For the Green family, the memory of October 1, 1994, is many things at once: the date of their greatest pain and their finest hour; a day of incalculable loss and life-giving gifts.
It was the day her 7-year-old son Nicolas died in an Italian hospital, two days after he was shot during an attempted robbery during a family vacation in California.
After receiving the devastating news, her parents Reginald and Maggie made a sudden decision that would change their lives and the lives of many others: they donated her organs.
Seven people, five of whom were teenagers, received Nicholas’ eyelids, kidneys, liver, heart and pancreas. The family’s story has sparked interest, leading to new donors being registered in Italy.
This month the Greens, who now live in La Cañada Flintridge, will return to Italy for a series of public appearances and meet some of their son’s surviving beneficiaries. It is the latest chapter in what the media has long called the “Nicholas effect,” a series of events that saved lives and kept their son’s memory alive.
“Thirty years later, when I think about him, I feel: Yes, it was a terrible thing. About all the books you didn’t read, and all the sunsets you didn’t see, and all the girls, you think, ‘I would fall in love with them,’” said Reg Green, now 95. “But on the other hand, I can always have that feeling: Yes, but you’ve seen more in your seven years than most people do in a lifetime. We work to make the world a better place.”
Nicholas Green was just 7 years old when he was murdered in 1994 while on holiday with his family in Italy.
(Associated Press)
While the Greens were shaken by Nicholas’s death and the crime that led to it — men who mistook his car for a jeweler shot him, leaving Nicholas as his sister Eleanor, then 4, lay beside him — they recalled their consent to the charity’s donation of his organs as an immediate and mutual decision.
At the time, Italy had one of the lowest organ donation rates in Western Europe. The Greens’ decision, coupled with the terrible circumstances of the boy’s death, led to this. increased media attention throughout Italy.
The mayor of Rome awarded the family a gold medal for their bravery. A mayor of Calabria promised to name a street after Nicholas. Squares, schools and monuments across the country are dedicated to him.
And organ donation increased. A year before Nicholas died in Italy, 6.2 people were donating their organs for every million people. Ten years later, when the story spread, the number of parks, squares and streets in Italy named after Nicholas tripled. There are about 20 people per million people.
“They ended up dramatically increasing organ donation across Italy,” said Tom Mone, director of external affairs for OneLegacy, a nonprofit that manages organ donations in Southern California. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any event that caused a cultural shift in attitudes toward charity outside of them.”
Over the years, family members have made dozens of trips to Italy to speak out on behalf of organ donation and about the people whose lives were saved by their loss. The woman who received part of Nicholas’s pancreas lived several more years after the transplant. She died of a heart attack in 2017 when she was 15.
Five others are still alive. The recipient of his liver, who was 19 at the time of the transplant, married and had children. The Greens were reunited with their eldest son. His name is Nicholas.
