Eight Corvettes rolled down a quiet street in Everett, Washington, in July 2020, trailed by Cinderella, Snow White, Captain America and Batman, for an audience of one: a five-year-old boy who could not make the trip to Disneyland himself. That boy, Avery Garcia-Valentin, grew up to become the Pokemon card collector and video creator known to hundreds of thousands of followers as Avery the Poke Kid, and he died on September 18, 2026, at age 12.

The parade was the idea of his Everett neighbors. Anne Heartsong started a fundraiser, Suhani Pillay posted about it on Facebook, and the post reached Nicole Lalwani, a friend in nearby Mountlake Terrace, who wanted Avery to have "a legit Disney-type parade," she told the Everett Herald. She lined up costumed characters from a Mount Vernon entertainment company, and Kendra Orton, a neighbor who had never met the family, brought in eight Corvettes from a Seattle car club because, she said, "somebody told me Avery likes fast cars." A check for $6,800, raised for what organizers called his "dreams and wishes," was presented that day. "As soon as we opened the door we were crying," his mother, Rebecca Rosa-Valentin, told the paper. "We thought it would be a drive-by, like all the COVID graduations and birthdays."

The family had moved into the Overlook at Riverfront neighborhood of Everett in 2017. His father, Christian Garcia, described their time together plainly: "Each day we spend is a blessing. He does the heavy lifting." His mother called him "the kindest old soul in the world," recalling that even as a small child he would wipe away her tears and tell her to stay strong.

In June 2025, Avery and his family began posting a different kind of video: pack openings of Pokemon trading cards, shared under the name Avery the Poke Kid across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. The audience grew fast, and his combined following passed 600,000, according to the AOL report on his death. He set a goal of reaching 100,000 YouTube subscribers to earn the platform's Silver Play Button, and fans pushed him past it within days. "You have helped our little boy live out dreams bigger than he ever imagined," his parents wrote, thanking the community, according to Dexerto. He also brought Pokemon cards to share with other children he met along the way, opening packs with them and giving cards away. His family described it on his GoFundMe page as simply who he was: a boy "always thinking about other kids, even while going through all of this himself."

Avery died on a Friday evening. His parents brought him to a rooftop garden, one of his favorite places, and stayed with him. "We held our beautiful boy in our arms as a family," they wrote afterward. "We kissed him. We told him how much we loved him. We told him how proud we were of him. And we stayed wrapped around him as he took his last breath."

He is survived by his parents, Christian Garcia and Rebecca Rosa-Valentin, his sister Zoee and his brother Elijah.

What Avery built reaches past his own following count. A neighborhood in Everett once turned an ordinary afternoon into Disneyland because one boy wanted it, and years later a Pokemon community that never met him in person did something similar from a distance, card by card and subscriber by subscriber. The packs he opened on camera, the cards he pressed into other kids' hands, and the videos still sitting on his channel are what he made of the time he had.