We are the parents of Jaylen Jose Santiago our sweet 12 year old son.

Jaylen passed away on November 13th 2024 in Robert wood Johnson hospital .

He went to the hospital with pain in his shoulder on Oct 27 in Tom’s River Community hospital.

That’s when they found fluid in his lung and transferred him to Monmouth hospital in long branch.

After doing a cat scan they seen he had a mass in his left lung, at that point he was transferred to Robert wood Johnson in New Brunswick.

He had a chest tube installed on Monday 10/28 to start draining the fluid from his lungs, to prepare him for a surgery to remove the mass.

The fluid from his lungs were draining until Friday Nov 1st. On Nov 1st he was scheduled a surgery to remove the mass, during surgery he suffered through a lot of complications to where the surgery could not be done but they were able to get a piece of the mass for a biopsy.

He was brought back to his room under heavy sedation that night. Early Saturday morning he went into cardiac arrest due to his ventilator tube not being installed correctly and he lost oxygen for about 9 minutes.

He was resuscitated while still heavily sedated with the fear of brain damage.

Later on that night he went back into cardiac arrest it took the hospital 40 mins of cpr and hit with the defibrillator about 6 times to bring him back. He was in critical condition on life support and from there we just watched him lose his brain functions one after another until he was claimed brain dead!

We do not know why any of this has happened and the hospital and drs are all saying they don’t know what happened.

We still do not know what the mass is that we came in for. The test came back non malignant meaning non cancerous but they do not know what it is still.

The hospital has not given us any answers!

This has severely impacted our family and we are at a loss for words. Our hearts will forever be broken.

If anyone would like to donate to help our family in these times it would be greatly appreciated.