Ga. Boy With Genetic Disease Needs Kidney After Dad Kills Mom, Who Planned to Donate Hers
A Georgia mom who planned to donate a kidney to her ailing son was shot dead by her estranged husband — leaving the now-13-year-old waiting for the organ he needs to survive.
A campaign promoted on Facebook and GoFund Me by friends of the murdered woman now is drawing attention to the plight of Kincaid Eaker, who was born with chronic, genetic polycystic kidney disease and lost two infant siblings to the same condition.
Kincaid’s mother, Audra, died on Dec. 27, 2016, when she was shot with a handgun by her husband, Darrell Eaker, as she drove the two of them away from a holiday party at a friend’s home, reports Patch.com. Darrell left the gun inside the Ford Edge SUV and walked off “without even attempting life-saving actions,” Woodstock, Georgia, police said in a warrant.
Darrell was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 16 years, reports the Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News.
Two days after the shooting, Kincaid Eaker said that “along with losing his mother, he also lost the kidney that was intended for him,” family friend Brandy Love, who hosted that holiday party, wrote on the GoFundMe page she titled “Kincaid Needs a Kidney.”
“To look at him you would not even realize he is sick,” Love wrote. “Kincaid plays the saxophone and is on the swim team, but he is functioning on 19 percent of his kidneys.”
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“Being born with this [condition] we knew that a transplant was in his future, we just didn’t know when,” she wrote. “Fortunately medication through his life has kept him stable. We hoped it would be several more years. THE TIME HAS COME! He is now on the transplant waiting list. The doctors are hoping in the very near future for the transplant, actually talking this Christmas, if we can get a donor. We thought we had a possible match but that is just not the case anymore.”
Love said Audra earlier lost two boys, one at four weeks old and another at just four days old, from the same disease that afflicts Kincaid. “Needless to say her spirit was crushed. It took her years to find her light,” which returned after Audra in 2004 adopted a daughter, Olivia, now 15, Love wrote.
Learning later that she was pregnant again, Audra “was extremely worried that the same disease would take this baby away too,” according to the GoFundMe page. “At that time there was a 1 in 4 chance of this disease inflicting her babies and it happened to all three of her boys. Although affected by the disease, Audra delivered Kincaid on the side of the road in an ambulance. … Kincaid was the only baby she got to hold right after birth, in that ambulance.”
“After a while in the hospital Kincaid got to come home. Even though he was in and out of the hospital earlier on, he got to grow and thrive with the continued help of a great medical team. Audra’s family was complete.”
Early on, Audra had gotten tested to find out if she was a match for for her son “when he was ready for a transplant,” according to Love. “She knew that there was no question where her son was getting that kidney from. It was coming from her.”
Today, Kincaid and his older sister live with “wonderful, loving, protective grandparents” in Tennessee, but he returns often to Atlanta, where the hoped-for surgery will take place, for his medical needs, says Love.
She describes Audra as “a strong, beautiful woman that loved her children fiercely and stood up for them and herself as much as she could,” and writes that Olivia “is the ultimate protector of her little brother. They are extremely close but she worries that she will lose her brother now. I would like to bring some joy to her life, to both of them anyway that I can.”
“I know Audra, their fierce protector and her purpose, keeps an eye on them,” writes Love. “I feel it.”
To date the GoFundMe account has raised more than $17,000, and directs potential kidney donors to register with the Emory Transplant Center.
