North Las Vegas boy honored on Rose Parade float

A child killed in 2020 when he and his sister were struck by a pickup in a North Las Vegas crosswalk was honored Saturday morning in the Tournament of Roses parade.

A portrait created with floral materials, known as a floragraph, depicts Alexander Bush, 12, on the Donate Life float in the famed parade in Pasadena. The floragraph recognizes Alexander’s life and his ability to help more than 300 people through organ, skin and bone donations via the Nevada Donor Network.

“It’s called the Courage to Hope float,” said Alexander’s father, Aaron Bush, in a phone interview from Pasadena this week. “If you are an organ donor, or if you are waiting for a transplant on the way, you have to have the courage to hope that things are going to get better.”

On Feb. 14, 2020, Alexander and his younger sister, Charlotte, then 9, were struck by a pickup as they walked home from school at Somerset Academy’s Losee Campus in North Las Vegas. Together, they were crossing Lone Mountain Road in a marked crosswalk near Losee Road when police said the truck’s driver, distracted by his phone, ran over the children. Charlotte Bush was critically injured and faces life-long disabilities as a result of the crash.

Aaron Bush and his wife, Jennifer, are now advocating for Nevadans to consider organ donation to help others through the Nevada Donor Network. Shortly after their son’s death, the parents were asked by the Nevada Donor Network to consider donating Alex’s eyes, other organs and tissue to help others. They said yes and the donations helped multiple people throughout the world live, including two women in need of kidneys and a 10 year-old boy in need of a liver.

Beneficiaries of Alexander’s gift live as far away as Egypt and Beirut, with 366 bone and soft tissue grafts distributed to medical facilities in Canada, Chile, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Steven Peralta is the Nevada Donor Network foundation president. He said being in Pasadena with the Bush family, along with other families of organ donors and transplant recipients from across the country, “is quite an honor.”

“We want people to recognize what a difference people can make simply by checking the box to become an organ donor,” Peralta said. “By making that one simple decision, it can help save and heal lives for generations.”

Aaron and Jennifer have worked this week to help decorate the float honoring their child. They’ve also networked with dozens of families in the past week who have lost loved ones who became organ donors. Aaron and Jennifer were in the grandstands on the parade route Saturday morning to watch the float — and the floragraph of their beautiful son — make its way through the parade route.

“It means so much to us that he is being honored,” Aaron Bush said. “The accident happened a month before the pandemic shut everything down. Typically after someone dies you have a funeral in a few days to a couple of weeks. Because we were still in the ICU with Charlotte, we never got to have any kind of celebration or memorial for our son, so this means so much.”

Anyone interested in learning more about organ donation can contact the Nevada Donor Network through its website.

Contact Glenn Puit by email at g[puit@reviewjournal.com. Follow @GlennatRJ on Twitter.