The Boy Who Wanted to Fly

The New York Times;  By MAUREEN DOWD;  Published: July 14, 2012.  RORY STAUNTON was always looking up.  As soon as he could walk, he wanted to fly. The exuberant freckle-faced redhead from Sunnyside, Queens, yearned to be up in the romantic night sky where, as the French pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, the stars are laughing. ….  Rory was so roaring with life, it was impossible to believe how quickly life drained out of him. On Wednesday, March 28, he fell while playing in the school gym and scraped his elbow, opening a cut. As Dr. Jerome Groopman wrote in The New Yorker in 2008, the most aggressive superbug bacteria often lurk in gyms and on artificial turf.  The following Sunday, Rory died of septic shock from a strep infection, his parents curled around his body in the hospital bed. Read more