The Georgia teen who two years ago received a life-saving heart transplant died Tuesday after a police chase ended in the teen losing control of a stolen car.

At 15, Anthony Stokes was on the verge of death. He needed a heart transplant that his doctors said he couldn’t get, due to his “history of non-compliance” with the legal system. They feared Stokes wouldn’t take his medicine. But after his family pushed for the doctors to reconsider, Stokes was added to the transplant list and received the life-saving operation within the month.

Police reports show Stokes’s recent run-in with the law began with a break-in in Roswell, Ga., roughly 20 miles north of Atlanta. An elderly woman called 911 saying someone had kicked down her door. When a police officer noticed a car that resembled the one involved with the break-in, he alerted it to pull over. Instead, the car fled.

After an unspecified amount of time, the driver lost control of the car and crashed it into a pole, but not before jumping the curb and injuring a pedestrian. Later, Stokes was identified at North Fulton Medical Center and pronounced dead. Mack Major, a close family friend and mentor to Stokes, said the incident was deeply troubling.

“I was sure that he would be one of my poster kids,” Major, who led the fight to get Stokes his transplant in August of 2013, told USA Today. “I really did, because he was on the right track, he was talking right. He was doing everything he was supposed to do.”