He didn’t see the gun his mom took out of her drawer just weeks after his 6^th birthday; didn’t hear the gunshot that sent a bullet straight into Sheila’s stomach. But he returned home with his brother Josh in time to see the emergency ambulance, horrified to learn his cherished mom might be dead.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: Why does a woman in your situation with a son who needed so much help decide to kill herself?
Sheila Swain, Jon's mother: Well...see, I didn’t really try to kill myself I was thinking about it but I said, “you know what? You could really end things and it, it would solve a lot of your problems but you know, what would it do to the people you love?”

Sheila was lucky. The bullet didn’t hit any vital organs. She told the local news media two weeks later, it was the enormous pressure of caring for Jon that led her to contemplate suicide but that the shooting was an accident.

But at the time of the shooting, dealing with her son’s disease, wasn’t Sheila’s only struggle. A closer look would have revealed the tell-tale signs—the haggard figure, the pockmarked face - a radical change from the strong and pretty woman facing the cameras just a year before.

Courtesy of the Swain family
Jon Swain with his mother Sheila

Sheila Swain had an awful secret. And it was a secret that would threaten to destroy not only her, but the son she so desperately wanted to keep alive.

Sheila Swain: Somebody came by and said, offered me... a line of cocaine. You know, just to get my mind away from what I was going through.

One line of cocaine very soon had become a $200 dollar a day crack habit.

Morrison: Did anybody know what was going on out in the outside world?
Sheila Swain: No.
Morrison: You’re a public figure. Your son’s a public figure. You’re kind of like a hero mom.
Sheila Swain: I know.
Morrison: But you were becoming a junkie.
Sheila Swain: Yeah...sure was.

So, even as she took Jon to the National Institutes of health in Washington for an experimental drug treatment which might help him survive a bit longer, she herself was going down fast.

Life became erratic, unpredictable. They moved when Jon was 7 -- from Colorado to Iowa. And her first stop was a nearby crack house.

If anyone on the outside had known the real story, they would have had to marvel just how did her sick son survive the next year...and the next...and the next.

Neil Willenson, founder of Camp Heartland: What I saw was a young man with tremendous energy and tremendous spirit and great athletic ability.

Neil Willenson, founder of Camp Heartland, a summer camp for children with AIDS, met Jon at the National Institute of Health when Jon was 10 years old.

Willenson: He had a little bit of a temper. He fought with kids sometimes. He certainly knew every swear word in the book. He seemed to be a young man that had lost his innocence at a pretty young age.
Jon Swain: I ask myself everyday, why was it me that got AIDS, why was it me? And then I think to myself, well maybe they’ll get a cure one day.

And Neil noticed something else: Jon’s boundless sense of optimism, his insistent belief that he’d beat AIDS... or at least fight it with all his might until the bitter end.

Willenson: He said, “Neil, it’s my goal in life to live to be 20.” It taught me once again that we just don’t have the luxury of time. It reminded me that this seemingly healthy boy that was standing before my eyes was probably going to die in the next few years.

Neil invited Jon to Camp Heartland— to play, to forget even for a little while his daily struggles with AIDS. But he also asked him to talk to children and adults about his disease, to educate, to give them some of the hope that kept him going.

Jon, giving a speech: What I don’t like about AIDS is when people say, “This man in room 37 is dying with AIDS.” You’re not dying until you’re dead. So, you know, always have hope...

Jon’s speeches took him as far away as Japan where the book he co-authored at the age of six had become a best seller.

And there was his mom Sheila, always by his side -- smiling, supportive, the public image of a happy family masking a grim home life that was getting even grimmer.

Josh Swain, Jon's older brother: She stopped being mom. We had welfare, we had food stamps. She’d trade our food stamps for money and then she’d buy crack.

Best he could, older brother Josh, now 13 years old, protected 11-year old Jon as their mother’s drug addiction reached its peak. Sheila binged. Disappeared for days at a time, leaving the boys to fend for themselves.

Josh Swain: We have no food in the house. We’re chewing on spaghetti sticks for chips. We don’t have no pop, no milk. There’s a bunch of alcohol. There’s no food.

Finally Josh had had enough. He left to live with their father. Jon, who had never had a relationship with his dad, didn’t want to go.

Josh Swain: I think that hit Jon pretty hard ‘cause our whole life me and him, you know, we were always together. After I left he didn’t deal. He got worse.

So he did. It was understandable, perhaps, given his mother’s addiction.. But now, without his brother around to support him, Jon’s spirit seemed to give way. And if what he did next was tantamount to suicide, would anyone really care?

CONTINUED : A camp counselor becomes a friend; Sheila Swain faces her demons when the past catches up with her

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