It is an insidious disease that strikes fast and is nearly always fatal. It was even the subject of a well-known movie.

The disease is Adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD. It has claimed the life of a 9-year-old Tucson boy who was healthy and happy just a few months ago.

Tonight friends and family gathered at the McDonald’s on Thornydale and Linda Vista across from Mountain View High School to raise money to help bury Demetrius Hall.

Fox 11 News

Most people say they feel happy when they are at McDonalds, but today, JP Ramirez is not one of them.

“He was a good friend and he was fun to play with at school,” Ramirez recalls.

Ramirez and his teammates on the Marana Broncos Football Team went to McDonald’s to talk about their friend, Demetrius Hall.

Ramirez remembers, “On the 50 yard dash at our school he was one of the fastest at it.”

Demetrius died on Friday. Team members and their parents will raise money to help bury him.

Fox 11 News spoke to Demetrius’s mother, Zaneta Hall, via phone who said, “We’re both gonna miss him but he will always be with us in our hearts.”

Hall has since moved back home to North Carolina. She said she found out last year that her brother had a rare genetic disease known as Adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD.

Hall reveals she had Demetrius tested and found out he had it as well. By about February, she says Demetrius had given up hope.

“He was like, ‘mom, I’m never gonna get better.’ And I was like ‘why would you say that?’ and he was like ‘I’m not’,” Hall recalls.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins used drugs to try and stop the disease from progressing. There was also a bone marrow transplant, but nothing worked.

Dr. Timothy Miller, a professor of neurology and director of the pediatric MDA clinic at Kino Hospital, says he studies rare genetic diseases like ALD. He says children with ALD may live only one to two years after being diagnosed.

“We do not have a clear treatment to cure this illness and for many of the children and adults with it, it is a fatal disease,” Miller reveals. “Patients begin their illness at different times in their lives.”

Doctors diagnosed Demetrius and his 8-year-old brother with ALD. Both played for the Marana Broncos. Teammates remember the last time they saw Demetrius and what he said.

“I said, ‘goodbye, I’ll see you next year in football season’,” remembers teammate Taylor Fitzgerald.

The movie Lorenzo’s Oil, which came out in 1992, was about a family who worked to come up with their own cure after they found out the disease was so rare no one was looking for one. They came up with an oil that worked.

Demetrius’ family used the oil, but unlike the movie, it did not work for him.

If you wish to donate money to help Demetrius's family, you can deposit money into the Memorial Fund for Demetrius Hall II at any Bank of America location. The account number is: 2370-0144-1392.