NEW JERSEY (WABC) -- As a recent high school graduate, 19-year-old Dean Mauriello isn't taking a class trip with friends before college. Instead, he's driving across the country, alone, interviewing people with the disease ALS along the way.

"It's good to think and heal and understand what's going through your head," Mauriello said. "Every day you make small decisions that can make the world a better place."

Dean's mother, Lisa Stockman Mauriello, died in 2021 just seven months after being diagnosed with ALS.

"The reason I am who I am is because of the values she instilled in me," he said.

Eyewitness News first reported on his mother's diagnosis in April of 2021, when she was fighting for expanded access to an experimental drug that could've prolonged her life.

Now her son is inter

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