GYPSUM, Colo. — For a brief, poignant stretch of autumn, people in this mountain town found inspiration in a dying boy named Alex Jordan.
He could have been anyone's little brother: A football-loving 9-year-old with a brave grin and a fatal case of leukemia. As his story percolated through the local news and radio station, it touched no one more than the football team at Eagle Valley High School. Players signed a football for Alex. They pasted A's to their helmets. They donned orange knee socks to commemorate the cancer ravaging his body. A Facebook page in his honor collected hundreds of supporters.
And when word spread late last month that Alex had died, the grief was real.
Trouble was, Alex was not.
It was all an inexplicable ruse, according to people who unraveled it, a fiction concocted by a 22-year-old woman who had worked with one of the football parents. There was no sick child. There had never been any Alex. The photo that had tugged at people's hearts, of a bald boy with a shaky smile, had been pulled from the Web site of a cancer foundation.
The police investigated, but are unlikely to press charges because the woman, Briana Augustenborg, never tried to raise money using Alex's story. She could not be reached for comment on her Facebook page, and she has said nothing in public about the hoax, leaving a baffled and betrayed town to wonder at her motives.
After disasters like Hurricane Sandy, scam artists invariably slink onto the scene to raise money for fake charities or bilk the government of disaster aid. But in this case, with money not a motive, people are asking, Was it all just cruel prank? Or a small, attention-seeking lie that simply spiraled out of control?
"We all bought into it," said John Ramunno, the team's coach. "They asked me, 'Why would somebody do this to us? Why would someone make this up?' That's a good question."
Walk into any lunch counter, church or small-town gas station, and you are likely to find donation jars and fliers describing similar stories of sick children, families displaced by fire and neighbors in need. And to many in this middle-class town a half-hour west of Vail's ski condos and private jets, a story of a child at the end of a losing fight for his life had deep resonance.
"It brought us together," said Jordan Hudspeth, the team's quarterback. "We know somebody's hurt, and we want to help out."
The story went like this: Two years earlier, Alexander Jordan learned he had leukemia, then thought he had beaten it. But the disease roared back, and with his life fading, the boy asked to spend his last months in the mountains. He was a sports fan, and quickly grew to love the Eagle Valley Devils — a team that had lost all but one game last season, but was storming toward the playoffs this year.
The story was told to parents, then local journalists, by a self-described family friend identified by people who spoke with her as Ms. Augustenborg. She layered it with vivid details: Alex had been treated in Memphis. He followed the high school's games over the Internet. He made a calendar tracking the Eagle Valley High School games.
"The team immediately took Alex into their fold," the Eagle Valley Enterprise wrote in an Oct. 24 article describing the support. "Then the fold started enfolding other E.V.H.S. students, parents, teachers and the entire community."
The team and coaches gave Ms. Augustenborg a football, a helmet, shirts and sweatshirts for Alex. They stenciled his name onto the fence ringing the football field. During one home game, when they scored or made a great play, they raised their hands in a point above their heads, to make an A.
"The whole community surrounded him and came forward," said George Hudspeth, president of the school's athletic booster group. "They were all so excited. It did show a side of the high school, that they're willing to rally and support anything."
Some parents and coaches were troubled by it all. Nobody had ever met Alex or his parents, or talked to them on the phone. Ms. Augustenborg was the sole source of information about him. She promised that the boy would attend a practice or game, but at the last minute, a medical problem would intervene.
"I should've looked into it deeper," Mr. Ramunno said.
On Oct. 25, Ms. Augustenborg, who lived in the area, informed Alex's Facebook followers that he had died, and the newspaper published an obituary mourning "our beautiful angel." But people in the community had grown suspicious, and alerted the police when they were unable to find a death certificate for anyone matching Alex's description. The story crumbled like old parchment.
The team was distraught. The newspaper published a long, apologetic account of the deception and the role it had played. School officials said they were trying to put the episode behind them. Football players tore the orange A's off their helmets, and said they were done thinking about it, and were trying instead to focus on a playoff game this Saturday.
The football parent who had helped bring Ms. Augustenborg's story to the team hurried off the phone quickly, as though embarrassed.
Mr. Ramunno said he wondered what happened to the new, signed football the team had donated. Someday, he said, he would like to have it back.
"It would remind me I need to be a little bit more careful," he said.
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