SHINING THROUGH

After Family Hardship, Pain and a Lot of Hard, Focused Work, Kirstyn
Knox Reaches Her Goal --Harvard

All she wanted to do was watch TV and chill.

It was Friday afternoon, and Kirstyn Knox had just arrived home from
Patrick Henry High School dog-tired and with a backpack full of homework.

Normally, Friday was the only weekday when she cast her books aside
in favor of "Dawson's Creek" or instant-messaging her friends.
Fifteen at the time, she was ranked at the top of her freshman class.

But this day was different. Donna Knox, her mom, had phoned and left
strict orders not to turn on the TV, not to use the computer, not to
talk to anyone on the phone.

"Go start your homework," the message said.

Donna Knox wanted to be the one to break the news to Kirstyn and her
younger brother, Dru, that federal agents had arrested their father,
pain specialist Cecil Knox, on drug and fraud charges.

That Friday afternoon was three-and-a-half years ago.

Looking back, the images are still surreal, Kirstyn says, as if it
were all happening to someone else:

The WSLS (Channel 10) news camera, her dad in handcuffs and shackles,
the words "Dirty Doctor" glaring from her television;

Her first visit to the Roanoke City Jail, where a relative of another
prisoner asked, "Is that your dad? What's he in for?";

Facing her friends at school Monday morning, telling her English
teacher why -- for the first time in her life -- her homework wasn't complete.

"The Knox case," as it became known, would overshadow the rest of
Kirstyn's high-school career.

During her father's first trial, which ended with a partial acquittal
in 2003, Kirstyn herself would appear on TV and in The Roanoke Times.
But what readers and viewers never saw was this: While Cecil Knox was
in court defending himself, Kirstyn was deep in her calculus books
and college-level French, intent on one lofty goal: Harvard University.

On Tuesday -- six weeks before her father's second federal trial --
she leaves for ivy-covered Cambridge, Mass., with a huge scholarship
in hand and a long, tenuous journey behind her.

Among the "Governerds" -- the self-applied nickname for regional high
school students who spend half of each day at the prestigious
Governor's School for Science and Technology -- the name for Kirstyn was "Mom."

As in "Yes, Mom," when she reminded her buddies they were about to be
late for class.

When biology teacher Cindy Bohland assigned lab projects, Kirstyn had
her entire table organized in 30 seconds. "She was more organized at
preparing her group than I was at preparing the whole class," Bohland says.

She was a born scholar, with a lawyer-mother who made sure she had
every educational opportunity and an unconventional dad who was so
focused on medicine that he could work late into the night and not
realize it was dark outside.

When Kirstyn was 4, her parents took her to a speech therapist
because she couldn't pronounce most consonants. Her favorite
children's movie, "Lady Lovely Locks," came out "ady ovey ocks."

Determined to make her words understood, she lined up all her dolls
and spent hours pretending to give them speech lessons. Within three
months, her consonants were perfect.

Among her friends' moms, Donna Knox set the strictness standard. As
Kirstyn and her classmates got older and wanted to venture out, the
question was always: "Well, what does Kirstyn's mom think? If she
says yes, you can go."

Kirstyn never once rode a bike without a helmet, rarely played
outside without an adult present. Once, when a homeless man camped
down the hill from the Knoxes' Hollins-area home, Donna Knox forbade
her to go outside.

"Meanwhile, my dad went down and introduced himself, and he ended up
becoming a friend," Kirstyn says, laughing.

Lynn Erwin, whose daughter has been Kirstyn's best friend since
preschool, calls the family "very Beaver Cleaver-y with a little bit
of hippie. Kirstyn could've turned out to be this Gothic free spirit,
but she's not. She's so focused, so together."

Kirstyn was a little envious of friends' polo shirt-wearing fathers.
When she was younger, she says, Cecil Knox's cowboy boots and
ponytail were "a little bit embarrassing."

His patients frequently called the house to talk about their
problems, calling him "Cecil" instead of "Dr. Knox." Some would show
up on the front porch bearing bushels of potatoes from their gardens.

"After the arrest, the patients would call frantic because other
doctors were afraid to treat them and they didn't know what to do,"
Kirstyn says.

"Now, they call to check up on him."

The Knox family agreed to be interviewed for this story but said
attorneys advised them not to discuss the legal intricacies of the case.

Federal prosecutors allege that Knox played loose with his
prescription pad, engaging in fraud and over-prescribing powerful
narcotics that, they say, ultimately led to several patients' overdose deaths.

Supporters, including some disabled Vietnam veterans, argue that Knox
saved their lives after other doctors had given up; that the U.S.
Attorney's Office is wielding its power unfairly and, lacking a
conviction from Knox's first trial, is trying to save face by retrying him.

Life changed dramatically after her dad's 2002 arrest. With his
practice shut down and several of his employees also under
indictment, Cecil Knox prepared to defend himself against a host of
racketeering, fraud and drug charges.

At home, money became scarce. Household repairs went undone.
Cupboards were sometimes bare. With their property seized and assets
frozen by the government, the Knoxes had to borrow money from
relatives to pay bills and attorney fees.

Kirstyn watched her parents switch roles. Donna Knox gave up her
volunteer work as president of a national advocacy group for POW/MIA
soldiers from Korea and the Cold War. Donna's father, a Korean War
radar operator, went missing in action a few months before she was born.

Within months of her husband's arrest, Donna Knox had re-established
her legal practice on Grandin Road with the family's housekeeper as
her secretary. Kirstyn kept her mom's books.

And Cecil Knox began keeping house ... as it were. "He'd read up on
medical charts for his case, then do laundry or start dinner at 2 in
the afternoon," Kirstyn says. "It would be spaghetti sauce, and by
the time we ate at 7 or 8, it would just be meat and no sauce. He set
the smoke alarm off a lot."

Knox tried to find work, but everything in the medical field was out
because of the case. No one wanted to hire someone under federal indictment.

"I couldn't even get a job delivering the newspaper," he says. "I
never in my life thought I'd open the refrigerator and find it empty
- -- sometimes for days." One friend sent anonymous Kroger gift cards
in the mail.

After school, he helped Kirstyn with physics word problems. "He can
still do calculus derivatives and trig functions," she says
admiringly. "One afternoon he read my entire statistics book."

At school, Kirstyn held her head high -- never once crying over the
predicament, never once bringing home a B.

"She never seemed to have a bad day," teacher Bohland recalls.

Adds her best friend, Becky Erwin: "She was always a great student.
But this made her even more determined. She wanted to be the bright
light for her parents."

The family visited Harvard and talked to admissions officers; Donna
Knox phoned local alumni for advice on what Kirstyn should include in
her application essay. They thoroughly researched what it would take
to be one of the 1,600 students chosen from a pool of 23,000.

Kirstyn needed to be well rounded, the family learned, and she should
stand out from the crowd. There were already too many soccer players
in the pool, too many ballerinas. Student government was OK, but a
little common.

"It became like a game," recalls Kirstyn.

She finally settled on Tae Kwon Do and dug out her old uniform, the
one she'd put away at the age of 10. Not only did the 110-pound
blonde become a second-degree black belt; but she also became an instructor.

Community service was another biggie on the college-application
"resume," the Knoxes learned. Over the next three years, Kirstyn
built Habitat houses, became a Big Sister at Boys & Girls Club,
rocked babies in the hospital neonatal intensive care unit.

At Patrick Henry she was among the first student jurors in a pilot
disciplinary program called Youth Court. While her dad was helping
lawyers build his defense, Kirstyn counseled school truants and
helped sentence first-time offenders -- kids caught smoking in the
bathroom or skipping school -- to community service.

To remain No. 1 in her class, Kirstyn would need a GPA higher than
4.0. That meant she could only take the hardest, weighted-grade
courses. With her tenacious mother's help, she persuaded PH
administrators to let her take a Virginia Western Community College
course in French that wasn't offered at PH.

Sometimes she stayed up after midnight doing homework. She concedes
that she's not the smartest of the "Governerds." But no one worked
harder, according to classmates and teachers.

Once, a health teacher brought the Knox case up in class, not knowing
Kirstyn was sitting in the front row. "I think she was more
embarrassed about her dad dressing funny ... than the charges," says
her boyfriend, Bill Carson, a freshman at the University of Virginia.
"She's a very straight shooter."

Besides, there was no time for self-pity or shame. "I had papers to
write and problems to do," she says. "The rage became a great
motivator. My school work, my dreams, my goals: That was the one
thing I could control."

If her first part of high school was overshadowed by her father's
legal woes, the middle years were besieged by something even worse:
his end-stage cancer.

"I have shaved my dad's head in the wake of chemotherapy," Kirstyn
wrote in her college-application essay.

Months after his arrest, Cecil Knox was diagnosed with stage four
non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a double-whammy that led to several rounds of
treatments. One of the regimens was particularly brutal. It was the
first time Kirstyn had ever seen her dad cry.

At home, the Knoxes didn't hide what was going on from their kids,
but they tried not to dwell on it. They never discussed the
worst-case scenarios: going to prison, death. Still haven't.

"I worried what it would be like for them," says Cecil Knox, now 56
and in remission for three-plus years. "Going to prison bothered me
more than death.

"With prison, people feel that then you obviously must have done
something wrong. I didn't want the kids to hear, 'Your dad is jail bait.' "

Her dad's first trial coincided with Kirstyn's junior year, the last
year in which grades appear on the college transcript. It was the
year Kirstyn, ever the perfectionist, would take the SAT four times,
improving her score with each try.

When she sensed her dad was especially stressed, she'd pick out --
and iron -- his suit for court the next day.

The trial also coincided with Patrick Henry's homecoming game. For
the first time, Kirstyn had been voted onto Homecoming Court.

With the judge's permission, court adjourned early that October day
so Cecil Knox could escort Kirstyn at the game.

Though she never discussed the case at school, she knew her friends
were following it in the news. They'd likely heard about his
admitting on the stand to smoking marijuana with one patient and
sharing a diet pill with another.

"It wasn't the best judgment, I know," she says. "But he told us
about it before the trial, and I respected the fact that he admitted
it, that he wasn't trying to hide it in court."

It had been a grueling day in court, with prosecutors cross-examining
him about his billing practices and whether he knew that some
patients were abusing or selling their painkillers, including
OxyContin and methadone.

But that evening, he and Kirstyn stepped into a convertible and
joined the homecoming parade. At Victory Stadium, they walked
arm-in-arm to the middle of the field.

She'd been nervous about how the crowd would react to seeing her dad
- -- by then a familiar face in the news -- but people cheered, and one
man shouted, "You go, Dr. Knox."

"She chose that moment to go public with her dad, so to speak, to
walk right into the midst of it," recalls a family friend, Pamela Corcoran.

At the trial's end, Kirstyn got special permission to have her
cellphone on in class; she needed to be on call for the verdict.

As the deputy clerk prepared to reveal her father's fate, Kirstyn
clutched her mother's hand so hard that her fingernails left marks.
As the decisions were quickly read, her brother, Dru, sobbed loudly,
asking his mom, "Is he getting off? If he getting off?"

Their dad was found not guilty on half the charges; on the other
half, the jury was hung. Mistakes were made, but the evidence fell
short of proving criminal intent, one juror told a reporter.

At home, a friend had balloons waiting.

But the victory was short-lived, as federal prosecutors pledged
immediately to retry Knox, following through with new indictments
within weeks and, later, a request for a change of venue to Abingdon.

Kirstyn reacted as she always did, plunging back into her studies,
controlling whatever she could and trying to give her parents
something else to think about, something good.

By the start of her senior year, she was still ranked No. 1 in her
class. Kirstyn ran to the mailbox daily. A big envelope from Harvard
would indicate acceptance while a small envelope would mean no thanks.

By mid-December she had her answer: a large envelope. Besides her
acceptance, it contained a financial-aid package that amounted to
more than two-thirds of the $45,000 annual cost of Harvard. Her
grandfather, a physician in Texas, had set up an educational fund
that would help pay the rest.

Kirstyn was proud but didn't want to boast. She made a decision not
to ask other students where they were going to college because she
knew they'd likely ask her in return.

"I don't like dropping the H bomb," she says.

She wonders whether she would have pushed herself as hard had her
father not been indicted; whether admissions counselors would have
found her application essay as compelling had she not mentioned her
family's struggles.

"For all I know, my essay could've been the thing that pushed me over
the edge to get admitted," Kirstyn says.

For spring break, she went on a cruise with Becky Erwin's family. It
was a graduation gift from her friend's parents, but Kirstyn
nonetheless worked to repay the Erwins half the cost of her ticket.

"She just has such integrity about her," Lynn Erwin says.

A week before graduation, her position as Patrick Henry High School
valedictorian was confirmed. She immediately set to work on her
speech, writing and rewriting, reading it into a tape recorder,
practicing in front of her parents and teachers:

A few years ago, my family turned a corner and found ourselves face
to face with a reality that was almost too much to bear. It would
have been easy for me to succumb to the pressure, but, as I see it,
when you are met with adversity, you have two options: you can let it
hold you back, or you can choose to learn from your misfortune and
use it as a steppingstone to move you forward. . . .

When Kirstyn rehearsed it in front of school administrators, she
choked up. But on the afternoon of graduation, her resolve shone through.

"Her words rang with such sincerity that even people who didn't know
her or the family were in tears," Corcoran, the family friend,
recalls. "You could've heard a pin drop, her voice was so steady and
her intent was so strong."

When a TV reporter asked afterward how she had managed to get into
Harvard, Kirstyn smiled and said: "I guess when they threw the darts,
one landed on my name."

She didn't reveal her greatest success: that in the middle of her
family's legal, medical and financial perfect storm, her
accomplishments were a soul-lifting distraction.

"The beauty of what she has done has really made life bearable,"
Donna Knox says.

Adds Cecil Knox: "When I think about it, I'd have to say that she's
helped us more than we've helped her."

Between getting ready for college and socializing this summer,
Kirstyn worked at Max's Ice Cream, did some baby-sitting, taught Tae
Kwon Do classes and showed her brother how to take over the billing
at her mom's office.

She hasn't decided whether she'll focus on business or pre-med at
Harvard. Nor has she decided when she'll tell her new roommate about
her father's trial. "I don't want to start off with, 'Hi, it's nice
to meet you; my dad's under federal indictment.' "

She plans to return from college for the closing arguments and jury
deliberation; the second trial, scheduled to begin Oct. 17 in
Abingdon, is expected to take up to eight weeks.

She worries most about her mom, who suffers from stress-related
ulcers and often can't sleep. Donna Knox can't afford to take off
work for the duration of the trial and will be able to attend only
one day a week.

Kirstyn calls her dad "a great example of grace under fire. He's not
been afraid to go out into the community because he knows he's done
nothing wrong. He believes the truth will prevail."

Last winter, her dad finally found a job as a cobbler apprentice at
Schafer Shoe Repair. Cecil Knox had long known Randy Schafer, having
helped him design and build affordable orthotics and braces for his
low-income patients.

He recently cleaned and polished Kirstyn's shoes, belts and boots --
getting them ready for the Cambridge winters, doing what he could do.