Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 5
The NYPD hosted a 16-year-old from Texas on Monday for a special tour around New York City to help make his wishes come true.
Dylan Jankowski suffers from a rare diagnosis and it had been his dream to visit Central Park. After being in and out of the hospital for years, that dream finally came true.
“It’s a very great place, it’s beautiful, you have so many sites to see — from history to America, it’s very great how people can build these towers and live out their dreams,” Jankowski said.
Over the course of his six-day visit, he got to ride the subway, go to a Yankees game, hold Babe Ruth’s bat, go to the Statue of Liberty, see Harry Potter on Broadway and even got a personal flyover.
He had a visit with the mounted police in the center of Central park and even hit Ellis Island to look for family names.
His dad is an officer with the Dallas Police Department and his mom, Kim, choked up multiple times throughout the day.
“It’s everything, it took a long time to get here, it’s a very long process,” she said.
It was the family’s first-ever trip to New York and it was made possible by Make-A-Wish because Dylan has a serious blood disorder.
“Aplastic anemia, I had no stuff to heal myself or any blood to produce, so I was in a critical state, it was life-threatening,” Dylan explained.
NYPD Officer Alexander Avila, who honchoed the visit, has an 11-year-old son with something similar.
“Now my son is a Make-A-Wish alumni because thankfully he’s doing better, he had a bone marrow transplant so he is doing much better,” Avila said.
Of all the wonderful sights and sounds he took in around New York, Dylan said everything gets a 10.
Source: ABC7 News
