CEO Orders His Corporate Jet To Get Heart For Baby Girl

Jet, August 7, 2000

Millionaire and businessman Robert Bernard believes in helping out when he can.

That's why he had no hesitation in lending his private jet so that a doctor could fly to Pennsylvania to get a heart for a baby girl who was fighting for her life in Chicago (see Week's Best Photo).

"When you see that someone is in need, it's a tremendous thing to be able to help," Bernard, CEO of march-FIRST Inc., a successful Internet start-up company, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

The baby, Jalene Jones of Hazel Crest, IL, was at Children's Memorial Hospital in need of a heart transplant. Her cardiac surgeon, Dr. Carl Becker, was trying to get to Pennsylvania to get a heart, but was stuck at Chicago's Midway Airport due to an apparent upcoming storm. Becker had less than six hours to get the heart and make it back to Chicago and get it into Jalene's body, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in a front page story by John Carpenter.

As fate would have it, Bernard had just arrived at Chicago's Midway Airport in his private corporate jet. When he heard of Dr. Becker's situation, he immediately told his pilot to take Becker and another surgeon to Pennsylvania.

The surgeons removed the heart from the dead infant in Pennsylvania and then rushed back to Chicago and successfully transplanted it into Jalene's body.

Jalene's parents, Clarence and Jackie Jones, were overjoyed with Bernard's generosity. "She is very lucky," Mrs. Jones said at Children's Memorial Hospital. Jalene suffers from cardiomyopathy--a swelling of the heart likely caused by a virus.

Without the new heart delivered on time, Jalene would not have lived more than a few months, Dr. Becker told the Sun-Times.