NEW YORK (AP) -- An Indianapolis jury awarded $2 million to John and Vicky Barnes, whose hemophiliac son, John Jr., tested positive for AIDS in 1985 and died six years later at age 14.

The couple had refused to join class-action settlements from four drug companies that were sued over tainted blood-clotting products. Thousands of hemophiliacs who got AIDS from tainted blood may now want to pass on the companies' $100,000 settlement offers, according to Corey Dubin, president of a group for hemophiliacs with AIDS called the Committee of Ten Thousand.

More than 6,000 hemophiliacs with AIDS tentatively accepted the deal, which has been delayed because of a dispute over whether some of the money should be paid to the federal government as reimbursement for health benefits.

In the case that ended Thursday, the Indiana jury agreed with lawyers for the Barnes family that Bayer Corp.'s Cutter Laboratories division should have warned patients in the early 1980s that its product, derived from human plasma, could carry the virus that causes AIDS. Bayer is a unit of Germany's Bayer AG.

It was only the second time in about a dozen similar trials that a jury sided with the plaintiffs. The first verdict, a Florida case, was overturned on appeal.

Daniel McIntyre, a Bayer spokesman, said the company is studying an appeal.

The major producers of clotting products Bayer, Alpha Therapeutic Corp., Baxter International Inc. and Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc. have maintained that there was no scientific proof of a blood-borne link to AIDS in the early 1980s.

DE CAUSES AIDS