Child of War Says Jennings Saved His Life

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Aug. 10, 2005 — -- Today Eki Foco is a strapping young man happy to be living in Grand Rapids, Mich., but back in 1994 when he first met Peter Jennings, Foco was a 13-year-old kid living through the hell that was Sarajevo.

Jennings was reporting on the war in Bosnia when he struck up a conversation with the precocious kid who just happened to walk by.

"We were playing soccer in the area when they [the ABC News crew] showed up," Foco said.

The conversation that followed offered an American audience a unique perspective on the war.

"What do you think about the future?" Jennings asked him. "Would you always stay in Sarajevo?"

"No," Foco replied. "I think in Bosnia never war stopping really stopping. All I think very much time this war will -- and I think when I grow bigger than now, maybe I go in America maybe in England."

George and Helen Priebe of Irvine, Calif., were two of the 17 million people who saw Jennings' report that night.

"I couldn't get over this boy's face," George Priebe said. "And something told me that could be my son, and it just stuck with me."

Priebe then called Jennings' office in New York and arranged to have a letter taken to Sarajevo where, through one miracle after another, it found its way to Foco.

"I could envision my family in that position, and it tore my heart out," Priebe said.

So he helped pay to get the boy and his family out of Bosnia and to the United States permanently.

"Without Peter's help, he would have been another boy in a war-torn country," Priebe said.

Instead, Foco graduated from a Michigan high school, joined the U.S. Navy, and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.