Sunday, December 18, 2005
A slain man's family was grateful to meet the recipient of his healthy heart.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Two years after her son was shot to death, Mary Price listened to his beating heart.
She put an ear to the chest of Robert Pavlovich, the man who received Greg Price's donated heart, when they met for the first time.
"It was strong," she said of the sound. "It was strong."
Meeting Pavlovich, a 69-year-old retired teacher from Camp Hill, Pa., helped ease the grief for Mrs. Price, her husband, Darrel, and their other son, Tony.
"Something beautiful came out of something tragic," she said. "It wasn't a total waste."
But Greg Price's death, which happened two years ago Dec. 12, remains unsolved.
About 5 a.m. that day, a Dispatch carrier reported a suspicious vehicle parked in the wrong direction along Alkire Road. Police found Price inside his Dodge Durango, slumped over the steering wheel, a gunshot wound in the back of his head.
He had left his home less than a half-mile away about 3 a.m. for his job at a trucking company.
He lived for nine hours after he was found, long enough for doctors at Mount Carmel West to harvest his organs after he was pronounced brain dead. The 34-year-old had indicated his desire to be an organ donor on his driver's license.
The donation of his lungs, kidneys, liver and pancreas gave five other patients a second chance at life.
Making contact
Because the identities of organ recipients aren't revealed to donor families, those who want to make contact with recipients must go through Lifeline of Ohio, central Ohio's organ-procurement agency.
Mary Price wrote letters to everyone who got one of her son's organs. Only Pavlovich expressed interest in a meeting, but he was the one she most wanted to meet.
"There is something about the heart," she said. "It's the lifeline. It's the center."
Pavlovich, who had wanted to thank the donor's family "from the moment I opened my eyes" after surgery, spent hours with the Prices at Lifeline's office. Together with Pavlovich's wife, Connie, and an adult son, Todd, they looked at pictures of Greg Price and talked about his life.
Unsolved case
Married with a 3-year-old daughter at the time of his death, Greg Price spent several years driving for Custom Coach. He was the driver for Sen. John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" bus tour during the Republican's presidential primary campaign in 1999-2000.
Price died on his mother's birthday. She returned from Mount Carmel that evening to find that flowers had been delivered. They were from Greg.
She and her husband have struggled to find answers to the slaying ever since. Police homicide detectives uncovered few clues. Nothing was taken from Greg, and there was no damage to the truck.
But the family thinks there is reason for optimism.
Just weeks before the Prices' meeting with Pavlovich, Philadelphia philanthropist Joe Mammana offered up to $100,000 for information leading to an arrest in their son's death.
Bittersweet meeting
Pavlovich hadn't known anything about the way Price died until the meeting.
"I was absolutely blindsided," he said. "I'm sorry about the circumstances, that that had to happen for my life to be prolonged."
An active man who spent 37 years as a coach and health and physical-education teacher, Pavlovich spent six months in the Cleveland Clinic waiting for a donor after congestive heart failure was diagnosed in June 2003.
He now speaks to health and driver-education classes about the importance of organ donation.
For Mrs. Price, the meeting generated "all kinds of mixed emotions. But you walk away with a smile and a warm feeling you never thought you'd have again."
She plans to keep in touch with the Pavloviches. "We couldn't keep Greg; there was no chance," she said. "But it is wonderful to know he gave life to another family. Bob's children have their father; his wife has her husband, and his grandchildren have their grandfather."