After son's death, St. Marys parents push for more heart-saving machines

St. Marys, Ga. - The bedroom at the top of the stairs is just as Andrew Cohn left it, a 15-year-old boy's room, fixed in time.

There's an electric guitar. A skateboard. A TV. Golf clubs with Florida Gator covers. A shoe company's poster of a demure, pretty girl.

The room makes it clear that Andrew loved baseball. There's a collection of baseball hats. There's his baseball glove. And there are the cleats he was wearing when he died.

It was a simple, ordinary collision at first base that jolted his heart out of rhythm, causing it to flutter weakly. It's called commotio cordis, and if the heart can't be shocked back into rhythm, it is quickly fatal.

But Andrew would have stood a good chance of being saved, his parents believe, if an automated external defibrillator, or AED, had been nearby.

It's a compact machine, easily carried, easily used. It's designed to provide an electric shock that can start a heart beating again, if it is nearby and used in time.

In 2010, when Andrew died, the Cohns knew nothing of such devices. Now they are experts, conversant in all the machine's details, all its costs - about $1,300 or $1,400 - all its benefits.

A little more than a year after Andrew's death, his parents founded a nonprofit, the AED Alliance. The group's goal: working with partners to put a defibrillator in every school in America, to have AEDs available for borrowing from fire and rescue stations, to have defibrillators as commonplace at sporting events as cheering parents.

Before, Harold Cohn was in the car business, and Becky Cohn stayed home to oversee their four boys.

After ...

"This is all we do now," Becky Cohn said.

"We're going through our life savings, right now," Harold Cohn said.

But this is urgent, they say. They don't want a single family to go through what they have.

Besides, said Harold Cohn - he's 58. What's he supposed to be doing? Sit in a jacuzzi, soaking in the bubbles?

So the Cohns turned their grief in action. Slow, steady action, one defibrillator at a time.

You can see it actually happen: As they tell their story, a doorbell rings. Another order of AEDs, packed away in boxes, has arrived by their front door.

Today, they will hold a press conference to announce that they will distribute 32 more defibrillators to schools and other locations, in partnership with groups such as the Jaguars Foundation, Firehouse Subs and others.

Children who were saved with defibrillators - Jonathan Caldwell of Camden County, Megan Leitner of St. Johns County - are expected to be among those there.

Harold Cohn said that $1.3 billion would put the Cohns' AED Allliance out of business. That's how much, he's figured, it would cost to put seven defibrillators in every school in the U.S.

Until that happens then, this is what they'll do.

"I don't know if you'd call it therapy," Becky Cohn said. "It's a way to get through."

A routine collision

On May 15, 2010, the Camden County Riverdogs traveled to play in Jacksonville. Andrew, though small, played first base.

It was the bottom of the first inning, and a throw from an infielder pulled him off the bag. The shoulder of the batter, who was racing toward first, struck Andrew's chest.

Andrew scrambled for the ball for a few seconds, trying to complete the play. Then he fell to his side.

Becky Cohn wasn't there. It was, she said, the first of his games she'd ever missed.

Harold Cohn saw it happen.

The collision, he said, didn't look scary. It looked routine.

He tries to explain. "If you had seen it - nobody's supposed to die from something like that."

At first, they thought their son died perhaps because of internal injuries. But a coroner's report later blamed sudden cardiac arrest.

Andrew's heart had fluttered, then stopped. It just needed to be restarted. If a defibrillator had been on the scene, Andrew would almost surely have grown to be 19, like his friends on the team, his parents say.

Andrew was an athlete. Andrew was tenacious. They tell the story: At age 11 or so, he decided he wanted to learn to throw with his left hand.

So he practiced and practiced some more and, four years later, he was ready. On the day he died, he was scheduled to pitch left-handed in the next game that afternoon.

He had been bursting with pride over that, buzzing with anticipation.

Andrew wore the number 00, and had since he was 9. He liked it because it was a number that made a statement, a number you had to live up. He did, though he stood just 5-foot-3, a full foot shorter than his three older brothers.

Harold Cohn is sure of this though: He would have caught up.

Signs and meaning

Three weeks later, a woman in Pennsylvania called the Cohns. She'd read about Andrew. Her son had died for lack of a defibrillator, and she told them she'd vowed to not put a marker on his grave until every school in the country had one of the devices.

Harold Cohn was moved: "I said, 'Becky, we have to do something.' "

That was their first contact with a network of grieving parents around the country, all of whom had children who'd died from cardiac arrest. It's the club, Becky calls it, that nobody wants to join.

But here they are, busy members. They're heartened by their progress in getting AEDs into circulation, but remain frustrated, they say, that most elementary schools in Duval County - where they each grew up - don't have machines. They are in each middle and high school, however.

Georgia law requires one AED in every public high school. Florida requires an defibrillator in every high school with athletic programs.

The Cohns have lived in St. Marys for 21 years, raising their four boys, on a big lot on the North River. The community rallied around them, they say, and Andrew's friends still come to visit them.

That helped. Yet they still for signs, for meaning in their son's death.

They're comforted remembering how Andrew had felt the urge to go to church, and pushed his parents to go with him. He was baptized in January 2009. "Something was tugging at him," Harold Cohn said. "Something was moving him."

And in the weeks before his death, he'd become obsessed with a song, Jay Z and Mr. Hudson's "Young Forever," with its refrain, "I want to be forever young/Do you really want to live forever?"

Said Becky Cohn: "For two weeks, that was all he played, and now he's forever young."

Here's another sign, Andrew's father said: After it happened, Harold Cohn would awaken early most mornings, go downstairs and cry. And when he did, the wind chimes outside would start ringing, even on calm days. That, he believes, was Andrew - his son, his friend.