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By Bard Arland-Fye
QUAD-CITY TIMES
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DELMAR, Iowa -- His parents thought Cory Selby was a "100 percent healthy kid" when they sent him off with their love to a Lutheran youth gathering in New Orleans.

There were no signs, no warnings that 15-year-old Cory had congenital heart disease that would kill him just after the opening ceremonies of an event he had anticipated with such faith-filled enthusiasm.

The New Orleans coroner's report came as a shock, Mike and Jill Selby said Monday as they talking about the youngest of their two sons. Cory died late Saturday after dashing up some stairs with other members of his church group at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans.

The family's grief is indescribable, the parents said in sometimes halting-voices, but their own religious faith is helping them accept what they believe was God's plan all along.

It just so happened that the National Lutheran Church Missions Synod youth gathering that Cory was attending coincided with this week's Clinton County Fair and Club Show in DeWitt.

Cory and his older brother, Chad, show swine at the event each year and have been involved in 4-H Club since fourth grade, their mother said.

But church came first for Cory, who would have been a sophomore this fall at Central Community High School in DeWitt. In making his decision to go to the youth conference, he told his family, "There will always be another fair," his maternal grandmother, Joyce Hudlik, said.

With 47 other people from churches in DeWitt and Grand Mound, he took a bus to New Orleans for the conference.

After participating in the chaperoned opening night event Saturday at the Louisiana Superdome, Cory and the other kids "were on the highest high they have ever been," Mike Selby said. "That's our comfort."

Details about precisely what happened as the teenagers were returning from the event are somewhat blurred.

The Selbys said they were told Cory and some other friends got off the elevator on the eighth floor of the Hyatt Regency and decided to run up the stairs a few flights to their hotel rooms.

Between the ninth and 10th floor, Cory collapsed.

Some of the friends thought he had simply fallen. He looked up at them and then lay back down, they said.

Two of them performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation until the emergency medical technicians arrived. The EMTs took over and rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

"He had a very enlarged heart, and it obviously got to the point that it wasn't functioning," said Dr. Frank Minyard, the coroner of New Orleans. "That amount of exercise put a strain on his heart. It's a real tragedy�he came down here to do good."

His parent believe Cory managed to do just that.

"God used Cory as a tool to strengthen the faith of all the 35,000 kids down there," Jill Selby said.

Through his death, the story of his faith is spreading at the fair this week. A moment of silence in Cory's memory and a short reading was planned before the start of the 4-H Olympics on Monday night.

"If his faith can save on person from going to hell, then his life was not in vain," Cory's father said.

Their own faith helps them to accept God's decision and to avoid asking why their son had to die now, Jill Selby said.

"Children are just lent to us to raise. He has a heavenly father, and we are his earthly parents," she said. "Through that, we are guaranteed that we will see him again, if we believe in Jesus Christ."

But they are human too, and the pain they feel hurts more than they could have imagined, they said.

"I'm not saying it's going to be easy�but I know when I cling to that cross, God will be with me," Jill Selby said. "We'll see him again, and it will be the most joyous reunion that can happen," she said.