He had everything to live for, yet he attempted suicide. He suffered from depression.
When I heard about what happened, I approached his father, Earl Burnham, athletic director at Upper Merion, and asked whether I could tell Jordan's story. I didn't know what his story would be, where it would lead. Honestly, nobody did. Earl and his wife, Georgette, a first-grade teacher in Lansdale, agreed.
And Jordan, who at the time didn't really know what had happened to him, how he'd gotten into the hospital - and still, to this day, has no memory of the jump - nodded in agreement that I could write about him. It was an act of faith and trust by all.
His story appeared in January 2008.
But that story was only the beginning.
On Monday, four years later, Jordan, now 22, returned to the University of Pennsylvania, to speak to a nursing class. He needed no cane. He walked in confident, smiling. And he told the students his story.
He explained to them how he was so popular in school, yet so isolated, how his friends could pick up signs of his depression, "but we were guys," and "they didn't know how to approach me, or what to do."
He told them how, on the afternoon of his suicide attempt, his mind had become irrational. He thought he had so disappointed his parents that "they don't even want me to be their son anymore," and "if I can't make them happy, what's the point in being on this earth?"
He described his injuries - brain bleed, kidney failure, so many crushed bones. His parents were told he had 24 hours to live. He awoke from his coma and had to ask his sister, mouthing the words, what had happened to him.
"You went out your window," she told him, weeping. "Who pushed me?" he asked.
He said the Inquirer story, the reaction he got, and the requests that followed to speak to school groups began to help him heal, to give meaning to his tragedy, purpose to his life.
