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Charity basketball game benefits 5-year-old with cancer
By ROBERT CONNELLY
AUSTINTOWN
Austintown Fitch High School students, staff and community members raised more than $1,000 for a 5-year-old boy battling cancer who isn’t from this area.
A charity basketball game that pitted students against faculty and staff at Austintown Middle School raised $1,101 from admission donations, raffles of donated items and donated concessions that were sold during the game.
“Its really surreal, actually. That this community that doesn’t know him [supports him]. It seems like the kind of thing that happens in movies,” Nick McElroy said.
McElroy is the father of Brayden Mitchell, 5, who has stage three kidney cancer. McElroy, attended Tuesday night’s game, “Ballin’ for Brayden.” The family lives in Brunswick, about 40 minutes south of Cleveland, and Brayden has been treated at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland.
McElroy said Brayden isn’t healthy enough to be around as many people that attended the game.
Fitch senior Sarah Melfe first heard about Brayden from her assistant basketball coach, Maria Rohan, who is a nurse at University Hospitals and helps take care of the boy.
Melfe, along with her peers and classmates of Steve Ward’s seventh-period life literature class at Fitch, decided on the basketball game as their yearly class project.
“I can’t think of a better thing to be doing for a 5-year-old,” Melfe said. “When Brayden comes back and tells us how excited he is, we get excited.”
About 200 attended the game, and they were asked to donate any amount of money to Brayden’s battle before entering the gym. A local band, Northern Whale, performed at halftime, and raffle winners were announced before the second half began.
McElroy said Brayden’s journey began when the child complained about a stomach ache over a few days at the end of January.
Doctors initially thought he had appendicitis, the rupture of the appendix, and they took the 5-year old into surgery. “While he was in surgery, the surgeon came in and told his mother [Kristi Mitchell] and I they found a mass,” McElroy said.
The mass was a tumor near the center of Brayden’s kidneys. Surgeons removed the first tumor and performed a biopsy a week later, finding another tumor on his left kidney.
Six weeks after beginning chemotherapy, that tumor was removed. Brayden was in and out of the hospital due to complications from surgery and also had weekly radiation therapy while continuing chemotherapy.
He has four chemotherapy appointments remaining in his treatment.
Brayden has received support from military bases around the world. McElroy said this is because Brayden’s biological father, David Mitchell, was killed in a training accident before he was born in March 2008 as a pilot in the Air Force.
But the game was different for Brayden. “He was so excited that a class of students, not adults, wanted to do this,” McElroy said of the event.
McElroy and Kristi Mitchell have also been helping their 2-year-old daughter with a genetic disorder. The two are engaged, but wedding plans have been put on hold while the family handles their children’s medical situations.
Ward said the class has been drawing depictions of superheroes fighting villains and sending them to Brayden, a fan of superheroes.
McElroy received a painting near the end of halftime from Jared Galbincea, a Fitch teacher, whose wife painted symbols representing superheroes, ranging from Thor’s hammer to a green lantern and Iron Man’s mask.