The message you are about to read below was sent in by a yahoo commenter named Alexa. She said
"Glad that mother's of children with mental issues are beginning to speak up after the Connecticut Shooting".
I
am John Golden's mother. My child was a victim of a violent assault
when he was 8 by a child who had been seeing psychiatrists since he was
4. Who knew.? Certainly not me . My son was a wonderful, quiet,
artistically gifted child . He was also very handsome. We had moved to a
new city shortly before the assault. We found out later that the boy
was in a class for violent children. It turns out that he wasn't the
only one in the family with problems.
In November 1990 LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man named David Kirby — his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world — surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby on his death bed, taken by a journalism student named Therese Frare, quickly became the one photograph most powerfully identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen millions of people infected (many of them unknowingly) around the globe. More than two decades later, on World AIDS Day, LIFE.com shares the deeply moving story behind that picture, along with Frare’s own memories of those harrowing, transformative years.
