HEALTH & BEAUTY

New Orleans has failed over the last decade to do urgently needed lead testing — claiming the water was safe even after losing track of where the city’s many lead pipes are — and then buried a 2017 report that would have alerted the public to the lapse.

Two years after the report was completed, officials still have not fixed the problems. And experts say the failures could have unknowingly exposed tens of thousands of people to the neurotoxin.

The 84-page report, obtained by BuzzFeed News, revealed multiple violations of federal law, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s requirement that local water boards must test the water only in homes that have lead pipes.

But New Orleans pipe records haven’t been updated since the early 1990s — long before Hurricane Katrina and the extensive street repairs and pipe replacements that followed. The water board wasn’t testing only homes with lead pipes as required by federal law, the report found, because it didn’t know where those lead pipes were.

The water board’s “incomplete and unreliable information on the locations of lead service lines left it unable to alert citizens who might be at risk of exposure to lead in tap water,” the report said.

Some Sewerage and Water Board employees — including the former executive director and the agency’s then-spokesperson — took samples from their own homes, or solicited their friends, and included them as samples from high-risk homes, raising the possibility that the water board was deliberately gaming the system to make the results look better.

In 2016, about 11% of the kids under 6 in New Orleans tested for blood lead showed concentrations at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter (the CDC maintains that no level of blood lead is safe for children). That’s far higher than the national figure — 2.5% of kids between 1 and 5 — and double the rate in Flint during the water crisis there, when 5% of kids tested had blood lead levels that high.

Lead is the most dangerous substance that commonly turns up in US tap water. At high exposures, the metal attacks the brain and kidneys, and harms multiple body systems. Even at low levels, it’s been called a “silent killer” that’s hard to spot, with particularly dangerous effects for developing fetuses, babies, and young children, whose brains are growing quickly.

Because of the holes in the city’s water testing, there is also no way to know if those kids registered high levels because of what they were drinking, or exposure to other environmental sources, like lead in paint or soil.

And scientists working on the problem say that uncertainty should be deeply concerning.

“New Orleans residents are being told their water is safe when there’s no evidence that’s the case,” Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who helped uncover the Flint lead crisis, told BuzzFeed News. “This is just repeating the mistake made in Flint.”

In fact, some of the water in people’s homes has already been shown to be unsafe. Independent testing by a research team at Louisiana State University looked at 376 New Orleans homes and found some with sky-high lead levels: as much as 284 parts per billion, nearly 19 times the EPA’s threshold for tap water.

City inspectors are supposed to test only the houses at highest risk — namely those known to have lead pipes — and should therefore be turning up the highest lead numbers. Yet in the 18 years of data the water board collected, they have never reported results over 33 parts per billion.

That should raise major alarms, said Adrienne Katner, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at LSU who led the testing and was consulted on the OIG’s investigation. “Why am I finding higher lead levels than they are?”

The documents do not make clear whether officials from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board were actively trying to skew the results or simply did not know how to find the city’s remaining lead-pipe houses. But according to the inspector general’s report, as well as summaries of interviews with water board employees obtained by BuzzFeed News through a public records request, employees knew they weren’t following protocols. And the decision to shelve the investigation has caused major concern among former employees and experts who were consulted when it was being drafted.

“That was nine years when there was not any appreciable oversight of this program. To me, that is doing a disservice to the public,” Katner said. Based on the report’s findings about the city’s testing practices, she said, “I would not trust those results.”

Local environmental groups have tried to call attention to the problem for years. Most recently, in late October, a community group called Justice and Beyond held a demonstration with some 50 people outside the water board headquarters to protest high water bills and lead levels.

“We have been saying to the mayor and the rest of the Sewerage and Water Board members that our scientists say there’s lead in the pipes and there’s lead in the water. And the Sewerage and Water Board says, no there isn’t,” Pat Bryant, a veteran environmental justice organizer and cofounder of Justice and Beyond, told BuzzFeed News. “Now we see their protocols are shoddy and there’s no science to what they do.”

Meghana Kamath Hemphill got pregnant with twins in early 2014, nearly nine years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. She and her husband had recently settled down on a quiet street in the Fontainebleau neighborhood, in a two-story home with dark brown shutters and a fleur-de-lis patterned in glass on the front door. Hemphill had grown up in nearby Kenner and hoped her kids would visit the music festivals and the swamp exhibit at the zoo, just as she had.

A molecular biologist who worked at a scientific publisher, Hemphill applied an earnest curiosity to everything she did. She took pains to stay healthy throughout her pregnancy, using spreadsheets to track what she ate.

So she and her husband were shocked when her water broke when she was just 6 months pregnant, splashing onto the sidewalk one evening as the couple ate at a pizzeria. The twins were born five and a half weeks later, at 2.5 pounds each, and battled brain bleeds and respiratory trouble in the neonatal ICU. At home, the Hemphills prepared for their arrival: They wiped down the parts before assembling their crib and upgraded their air filters to catch finer particles.

After nearly three months in the NICU, their daughter came home, with her brother following eight days later, on Thanksgiving. The Hemphills kept up their hygiene regime, videoconferencing into the family Christmas gathering to avoid catching bugs from the older kids. “We literally just kept the house as a bubble,” Hemphill told BuzzFeed News.

Over the next year, the twins had physical and occupational therapy, and slowly caught up with developmental milestones of kids their age. In October 2015, as the Flint headlines broke, Hemphill stumbled on a post to a neighborhood forum online announcing that Katner was offering to test New Orleans homes for lead. Thinking of her toddlers’ possible exposure, she quickly signed up.

The results arrived by email a month later: The Hemphills’ water contained low levels of lead, peaking at 6.7 parts per billion. The reading was below the EPA’s tap water limit of 15 parts per billion, but the brochure sent by Katner’s lab described the reading as a “significant contamination problem.”

To Hemphill, the news was terrifying. She worried about how the lead may have affected her pregnancy and her kids’ development. As newborns, the twins had drunk formula mixed with tap water — which, according to the EPA, can be a major source of lead exposure for infants at a critical period of brain development. “I never thought to check the water. You just kind of assume you pay the city to take care of that.”

As she researched further, Hemphill learned that lead in drinking water — even at low levels — has been linked to preterm labor. “I kind of lost it that point,” she said.

She called the water board to demand that her pipes be checked. Nothing happened. Every few weeks, she’d call back again. In the meantime, the Hemphills stopped drinking water from the tap and set up a filter on the kitchen faucet. They stopped using the ice maker in the fridge. And any time she helped the twins brush their teeth or take a bath, Hemphill would remind them: Don’t drink the water — there’s lead in it.

It was Flint, Michigan, that got former New Orleans inspector general Ed Quatrevaux thinking about lead. His team had been investigating the New Orleans water board for several of the eight years he’d been in office — finding that the agency had failed to keep track of overdue accounts, that it had paid excess overtime, and that its employees stole more than $500,000 worth of brass fittings meant for water meters.

“This organization is riddled with corruption,” Quatrevaux told BuzzFeed News.

By the summer of 2016, representatives of his office, supervised by the then-assistant inspector general for inspections and evaluations, Nadiene Van Dyke, were conducting interviews with water board employees and local academic experts, including Katner, about how they looked for lead.

One part of the inspector general’s inquiry was made public in July 2017, when Quatrevaux rebuked the water board for failing to inform residents that construction work — widespread in a city still being rebuilt over a decade after Hurricane Katrina — could shake lead from neighborhood pipes and into their drinking water.

The scientists who had contributed behind the scenes were eagerly anticipating the completed investigation. But less than a week after that first report, a scandal hit the inspector general’s office itself: the New Orleans Advocate obtained an internal report alleging that Van Dyke had helped friends get contracts, told employees to falsify receipts, and was “demeaning” to non-white employees.

She and Quatrevaux, who had approved the review, retired three months later. (Quatrevaux described the inquiry as a “hit job” led by an employee with a personal grudge; Van Dyke declined to comment on her departure.)

NEW DELHI — A few Pakistani young people are the latest associates of Gen Z to try to save the globe, using their federal government to courtroom about perilous concentrations of air air pollution that blankets the place each individual 12 months.

Mishael Hyat, 17, Leila Alam, 13, and Laiba Siddiqi, 18, have accused the government of Punjab of violating their suitable to lifetime and well being by underreporting the severity of Lahore’s polluted air. The young people filed a petition with the Lahore Significant Courtroom on Tuesday with their issues, aided by Alam’s father, Ahmad Rafay Alam, who’s serving as their lawyer.

Rafay told BuzzFeed Information that he recognized the pollution unexpected emergency Pakistanis were being struggling with when he watched a online video on Facebook, in which an interviewer went to a classroom in Lahore and requested any young children who were sick to elevate their arms.

“It was heartbreaking. More than 90% of them were being ill and experienced a household member that was unwell because of the air also,” he reported. (He was unable to relocate the video clip to share it with BuzzFeed News.)

The air pollution crisis in Pakistan and India has turn out to be an once-a-year party that lasts from October to January, owing in aspect to the burning of stubble crop by farmers in the North Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, and Pakistan’s standard industrial, agricultural, and transportation procedures. Hotter temperatures as a final result of weather modify mean that the smog hovers in excess of this area, increasing and stagnating.

The problem has led to New Delhi declaring a community wellness emergency — educational facilities were being closed and planes had been not able to land mainly because of the pollution. Exposure to one certain style of air pollution — a high-quality, fatal little bit of make any difference suspended in the air, identified as PM 2.5 — accounts for 1.24 million fatalities in India on a yearly basis, and boosts the possibilities of contracting heart and lung ailments. Evidence implies that pollution also leads to stunted mind development in small children.

The petition consists of a report from Lahore’s Children’s Medical center, which states that the health care middle has viewed a threefold improve in admissions presenting upper body or cardiovascular problems in the past 10 years.

The 3 teenagers’ petition names and targets a number of government agencies in cost of checking air top quality, these as the Punjab Environmental Protection Council, the Punjab Safe and sound Cities Authority, the Surroundings Protection Section of Punjab, and the Pakistan Ecosystem Defense Agency.

According to the teens, the classification of air employed by Lahore’s authorities to evaluate how lousy the city’s air is (recognized as its air top quality index or AQI), is at odds with the classification utilized by the United States Environmental Defense Agency.

Air quality that is labeled as “severe” by the US EPA only demonstrates up as “moderate” on the Lahore government’s internet site. The petition promises that the site — which is intended to monitor air good quality info and warn citizens when it is perilous to go out of the household — underreports the severity of air pollution, as a result exposing individuals to unacceptable levels of chance. The governing administration info also fails to mention the unique types of pollutants current in the air.

Hyat, a aggressive athlete and swimmer who represented Pakistan in the South Asian Online games in 2016 and is getting prepared to contend in the video games when far more this year. She instructed BuzzFeed News that her skill to educate was severely impacted by Lahore’s air.

“To swim far better, we have to raise our lung ability. So I’m supposed to run and cycle every single day, and that has been pretty much not possible of late,” Hyat claimed. “And the far more I exert myself in the present-day stages of pollution, the far more inclined I develop into to respiratory sickness. It is a horrible predicament for athletes — young children and old persons in individual.”

Hyat, who spoke to BuzzFeed News above the telephone from Lahore, reported she experienced constantly been included with environmental activism. “I fulfilled Leila at the local climate improve march in Lahore last thirty day period. Provided that this circumstance repeats itself in Pakistan every winter season, we recognized that we experienced to do something to adjust it,” she mentioned.

In the petition, Alam has mentioned the government’s misreporting of data has intended that she does not know when she requires to don a mask outdoor.

Siddiqi was part of the arranging crew for the all over the world weather strike previous month, in which young folks walked out of faculties and workplaces in 3,600 various destinations to simply call awareness to the weather emergency. The motion began with 16-calendar year-previous Greta Thunberg, who started placing on your own every Friday in August final 12 months outside of the Swedish Parliament making in Stockholm to phone attention to weather transform. In the yr given that, the motion has spurred hundreds to hundreds of kids to strike on a regular basis.

Siddiqi is from Karachi and reports at the Lahore College of Administration Sciences. “Karachi is rather densely polluted much too, but I’ve designed a long-term cough considering the fact that I arrived to Lahore — and I haven’t even found the worst of the smog year however,” she reported. “I also know about other individuals, primarily those with bronchial asthma, who have actually been struggling.”

“Once the march was over, we commenced contemplating of strategies to retain the momentum,” Siddiqi instructed BuzzFeed News about WhatsApp. “We realised that, apart from just grassroots awareness attempts, we required to really interact in lobbying or pushing for legislative reform.”

Hyat said: “We’re wanting for the court docket to act quickly and decisively. This can’t go on in the lengthy operate. Our futures are at stake.”

When Amber Freed first told doctors her baby boy wasn’t able to move his hands, they said that wasn’t possible.

Freed had given birth to twins in March 2017. While her baby girl, Riley, squirmed and babbled and crawled through the first year of her life, her fraternal twin, Maxwell, was different. He didn’t crawl or babble like Riley did. “I would fill out their baby books each month, and Riley had met all of these milestones. Maxwell didn’t reach one,” she said. Most alarmingly, however, Freed noticed that he never moved his hands.

She knew the news was going to be bad when they sent her to the “sad room” at the hospital, a featureless conference space filled with grim-faced doctors, to hear the diagnosis.

“You take your baby to the doctor and you say, ‘He can’t move his hands.’ And they look at you and they say, ‘Of course he can,’” said Freed.

“Then they look for themselves, and you can see from the look on their faces that they have never seen anything like this.”

On June 14, 2018, at the Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver, Maxwell was diagnosed with a genetic disease called SLC6A1. The diagnosis explained why the infant hadn’t moved his hands or learned how to speak for the first year of his life, while Riley was thriving. But it didn’t explain much else: All the doctors who diagnosed Maxwell knew about the genetic disease came from a single five-page study published in 2014, the year of its discovery. It was too rare to even have a name, she was told, so the doctors just called it by the name of the affected gene: SLC6A1.

Now her 2½-year-old son is at the center of a multimillion-dollar race against time, one that’s come to include genetics researchers whom Freed personally recruited, paid for by $1 million that Freed and her husband, Mark, have raised themselves. At the center of their research will be specially crafted mutant mice that Freed paid scientists in China to genetically alter to have the same disease as Maxwell. The four mice are scheduled to arrive stateside next week, but Freed said she’s prepared to smuggle them into the US disguised as pets if there are any problems.

In total, Amber and Mark will need to raise as much as $7 million to test a genetic treatment for their child. And unless they can find — and fund — a cure, SLC6A1 will condemn Maxwell to severe epileptic seizures, most likely starting before he turns 3. The seizures may trigger developmental disabilities for a lifetime, often accompanied by aggressive behavior, hand flapping, and difficulty speaking.

And the Freeds will have to do it largely alone — there are only an estimated 100 other people diagnosed with SLC6A1 in the world. “This is the rarest of the rare diseases,” pediatric geneticist Austin Larson of the Children’s Hospital Colorado told BuzzFeed News.

SLC6A1 is just one of thousands of untreatable rare diseases, and the perilous path it has set up for Freed, half science quarterback and half research fundraiser, is one that few parents can follow. “My dream is to create a playbook of how I did this for those that come after me,” said Freed. “I never want there to be another family that has suffered like this.”

“You can think of SLC6A1 as a vacuum cleaner in the brain,” genetic counselor Katherine Helbig of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told BuzzFeed News. Helbig will speak at a conference on the gene at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in Baltimore on Dec. 5, an effort organized by Freed.

The protein made by the gene acts as a stop sign to message-carrying chemicals in the brain, halting them by vacuuming them up once they reach their destination brain cell, Helbig explained.

When one of the two copies of the SLC6A1 gene in every brain cell is damaged, like in Maxwell’s case, too little of its protein is available to perform its vacuuming duties, leading to miscommunication between cells, developmental disorders, autism-like symptoms, and, often, severe epileptic seizures.

Maxwell is about the age when epileptic seizures typically start in kids with the genetic disease, said Helbig, adding, “There probably are many more children out there who have it, but they just haven’t had the right test to find it.” At least 100 similar genetic defects cause similar kinds of epilepsy, afflicting about 1 in 2,000 kids, she said.

“I was the one who presented this diagnosis to Amber,” said Larson of the Children’s Hospital Colorado. There was no medicine or diet or any other treatment for SLC6A1. It wasn’t an easy conversation. “Most of the time when we present a diagnosis for a genetic condition, there is not a specific treatment available.”

“At that moment, it was just vividly clear that the only option was for me to create our own miracle,” said Freed. “Nobody else was going to help.”

Half the battle with a rare genetic disease is getting researchers interested, said Helbig.

So that is what Freed set out to do. She quit her job as a financial analyst and started making phone calls to scientists, calling 300 labs in the first three months. For those who didn’t respond, she sent them snacks via Uber Eats.

Her search, and a rapid-fire education on genetic diseases, led her to conclude the best hope for helping Maxwell was an experimental technique called gene therapy.

All the roads zeroed in on one scientist: Steven Gray of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. In 2018, a team headed by Gray reported the first human experiments of gene transfer by spinal injection, conducted in 5 to 10 children with mutations in a gene called GAN that causes swelling in brain cells.

The GAN gene transfer in that experiment, first tested in mice, attached a corrected version of the damaged gene to a harmless virus. Viruses reproduce by infecting cells and hijacking their DNA machinery to reproduce their own genes, making more viruses. The gene therapy virus in turn leaves behind a corrected gene in the DNA of cells they infect. Injected into the spinal cord, Gray’s virus can travel straight to the brain, leaving behind the corrected gene after the virus has run its course.

“I gave him my 30-second equity analyst pitch. I told him why Maxwell was a good patient, that we would raise $4 million to $7 million, and quarterback every step of the research,” she said. “And it worked. He agreed to make it a priority — if we could raise the money.”

Less than a month after meeting Gray, Freed contacted a lab at Tongji University in Shanghai that was also researching SLC6A1. The lab agreed to develop a mouse with Maxwell’s specific mutation for less than $50,000, using a gene modification technology called CRISPR that has revolutionized genetic engineering in the lab. “CRISPR mice are much more expensive in the US, and this lab had experience with the gene,” said Freed.

By July of this year, an experiment with a gene therapy virus that corrects SLC6A1 was tested on normal lab mice, which showed no sign of a toxic response, an encouraging sign. And by September, a line of CRISPR mice with Maxwell’s exact genetic mutation had been created at Tongji University.

“It is the literal mouse version of him,” said Freed. “Testing a therapy in this mouse is as close as science can get to testing in my son directly.”

To pay for all this, Maxwell’s family started fundraising last November and organized the first medical symposium on SLC6A1 in New Orleans that same month. They opened a GoFundMe account, which has raised $600,000, and held 35 fundraisers, which raised an additional $400,000 by October. In one charity competition, Larson from the Colorado Children’s Hospital, who diagnosed Maxwell, personally helped her raise $75,000.

That money is helping to pay for the next step — getting the CRISPR mice to Gray’s lab to test the SLC6A1-correcting virus on them. But it’s not as simple as putting the mice in a box and shipping them by mail. The mice will be transferred through a lab at Vanderbilt University headed by Katty Kang, an expert on the neurotransmitter disrupted by Maxwell’s mutation.

“Amber is helping us to advance science, and everyone is making this a priority because of the young lives at stake — not just Maxwell, but other children this could help,” Kang told BuzzFeed News.

Once the four mice arrive, they will spend several weeks in quarantine, be tested to make sure they have Maxwell’s specific “point” mutation in the SLC6A1 gene, and breed with normal lab mice to produce generations of mixed-inheritance mice to serve as controls in future experiments. The mutant mice will be closely monitored before they head to UT Southwestern to make sure that they demonstrate the same problems and genetics as human patients with SLC6A1 and can therefore be used in any future clinical trials of gene therapy.

Right now at UT Southwestern, results from a safety test of the gene therapy virus — conducted by Gray’s lab on young, normal lab mice — is awaiting publication. If that works out, once the Chinese mice are sent over, they will also receive the gene-correcting virus. His team will see if their symptoms improve and to what extent their brain cells accept the corrected gene.

And then, Freed just needs another $5.5 million. Half a million dollars will go to test the virus in a second SLC6A1 animal model, likely a rat, as another safety step. Two million dollars will go toward creating more of the gene-correcting virus for a human safety study if that proves to be safe. And finally, if all that works out, $3 million will be needed to conduct the experiment on Maxwell and other children next year, following the path of the GAN clinical trial led by Gray.

“It’s a really horrible realization that the only thing standing in the way of a cure for your 2-year-old is money,” said Freed.

Freed acknowledges that she has only been able to pursue a cure for Maxwell because her family has the resources to do so — which she would never have had growing up in small towns in Texas, Montana, and Colorado in a poor family affected by alcoholism. “I grew up visiting my parents in rehab and knew what to say to put a family member on a 72-hour psychiatric hold by age 12,” she said. She dug herself out to build a career in finance, and hoped her kids would never have to experience the struggles she did growing up.

Even so, the fight hasn’t been easy on them — or on Maxwell’s sister, Riley.

Freed worries her daughter is growing up in doctors’ waiting rooms, waiting on treatments for her brother to end. Maxwell’s disease has progressed, causing him to constantly clench his fingers, and sometimes pull his sister’s hair. His 3-year-old sister will gently remind him, “Soft hands, Maxie.”

Families like the Freeds are at the forefront of efforts to turn diagnoses of rare genetic ailments, which often used to be the stopping point for medicine, into treatments. A similar case saw the family of a 3-year-old girl, Mila Makovec, raise $3 million for gene therapy to cure her Batten disease, a deadly genetic brain disease that affects 2 to 4 of every 100,000 children born in the US.

In a New England Journal of Medicine editorial on that case published in October, FDA officials questioned how high the agency should set the safety bar for such treatments, meant for severe diseases affecting so few people. In these cases, parents are often collaborators in developing treatments, and might not want to stop efforts that come with high risks. “Even in rapidly progressing, fatal illnesses, precipitating severe complications or death is not acceptable, so what is the minimum assurance of safety that is needed?” wrote senior FDA officials Janet Woodcock and Peter Marks.

Finally, Woodcock and Marks wrote, “finding sustainable funding for such interventions may prove challenging, because the cost of production can be quite substantial, particularly for gene therapies.”

In our era of financial inequality, the specter of wealthy parents buying custom genetic treatments for their children’s ailments — while other parents desperately resort to GoFundMe accounts, or else do nothing — looms as a possibility.

“This is way beyond what anyone expects of families,” said Larson. The pathway has been opened up by the brave new world of improved genetic diagnoses, and the coming of age of rapid genetic engineering tools like CRISPR.

But only 20 years ago, an experimental gene therapy that relied on a “harmless” virus killed an 18-year-old volunteer, Jesse Gelsinger, in a research misconduct case that brought gene therapy to a standstill. Now more than 2,500 gene therapy clinical trials have been conducted, and more than 370 are underway. The human genome was not sequenced until 2000; today, mapping an entire human gene map costs around $700. In this new era, customized treatments for rare genetic diseases like Maxwell’s are suddenly possible.

“What I hope is that we are paving the way for other parents to help their children,” said Freed.

Families of children with rare genetic diseases are also working together to make treatments like the one Freed is spearheading possible, said Larson.

“They support each other and work together,” he said. The best example might be the families of children with cystic fibrosis, who — through the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the discovery of the gene responsible for the disease in 1989 — have pushed for the discovery of new drug treatments. In October, the FDA approved a “breakthrough” pharmaceutical that could treat 90% of cases.

“It is easier working with FDA on this kind of approach rather than starting from scratch,” Gray told BuzzFeed News by email. After all, he said, “it’s easier to follow a path that you’ve already walked down.”

Similarly, Freed hopes the SLC6A1 Connect advocacy group she started can lead to similar treatments for other children with genetic epilepsies caused by the gene.

“I don’t think any parent should be expected to single-handedly cure his or her child’s rare disease,” said Helbig. “Amber is a very tenacious and persistent person, and she will fight tooth and nail for her kids. But a lot of people don’t have the resources — and they shouldn’t have to.”

Helbig says that “cautious optimism” is appropriate on the chances of research yielding a genetic therapy for children like Maxwell. “For SLC6A1, it’s really too early to say whether this is going to work.”

But if it works, it might lead many more parents to get genetic tests for children that will reveal undiagnosed problems, she said. Many doctors discourage extensive genetic tests, thinking they won’t find anything helpful. In the absence of known treatments, insurers are also reluctant to pay for such tests, discouraging all but the most fortunate and resourceful parents. Even for them, there are no guarantees.

“The other tough reality is the possibility this treatment won’t be completed in time to help Maxwell,” said Freed. “I love him with every ounce of my being, and I want him to know that I did everything humanly possible to change his outcome.” ●