When Leesly Huerta was 18, she had her whole life ahead of her. She was looking forward to graduating from high school with honors and being the first in her family to attend college.

The future was bright. Or it was until Feb. 10, 2007, when Leesly was traveling home to Bolingbrook with her aunt and uncle after attending a concert at the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown. 

They were driving on I-55 at around 2 a.m. when a 21-year-old drunk driver smashed into their van. Leesly was lying down asleep in the back seat with her seatbelt on when the impact occurred. It was an older van with a seat belt that just went around her waist.

“I didn’t know exactly what happened,” Huerta said of the night. “I just remembered the huge impact.”

She recalls feeling like she couldn’t breathe and seeing a light in the distance.

Huerta thought she was dying and cried out to God asking him to keep her alive so she could say good-bye to her parents.

After that, she was in and out of consciousness as first responders pulled her from the car and transported her and her uncle to Loyola Medical Center in Maywood.

“I didn’t know what was reality and what wasn’t,” Huerta recalled.

Eventually, she learned that while the seat belt saved her from being ejected from the van, it severely damaged her internal organs and spine.

She underwent several surgeries to repair her internal organs before doctors were able to start working on her spine. When they did, they discovered damage so severe that they gave Huerta between and 1% and 5% chance of walking again.

It took several weeks for everything to set in, all while she fought excruciating pain. Huerta recalls the moment when the reality of her situation kicked.

Nurses had transferred her from the bed to a chair for the first time and propped her up with pillows. Leesly looked across the room and saw her mother crying. She wanted to go and comfort her, but her legs wouldn’t move.

“I remember saying to my brain, ‘Please just make my toes move.’ And I wouldn’t get that,” Leesly said.

It was at that moment Leesly broke down and began questioning why God let her live.

“Literally, I’m thinking, ‘My life is over.’ All my plans, everything,” she said. “I just started freaking out.”

Born in Mexico, Huerta is the oldest of five children and dreamed of becoming successful and supporting her family, even buying her parents a house of their own. As a person of faith, Leesly argued with God, but he didn’t abandon her, she said. 

Huerta said a man would visit her in her dreams, a man she believes was Jesus. He took her to various places around Chicago and told her that someday she would help people in the community.

“I thought, ‘Why is he telling me these things?’” Huerta said with tears in her eyes and emotion in her voice. “During these times I also didn’t have any pain.”

She carries those moments in her heart because she believes that was God telling her there was a reason she didn’t die in the crash; her life has a purpose.

Since her accident, Huerta has been using a wheelchair and lives in near-constant pain. She doesn’t like taking pain medication because it makes her drowsy and fogs her mind. There are rods in her spine and she uses a colostomy and catheter.

Leesly had to adjust to all of that after she was released from the hospital and moved into rehab.

Once she was finally able to return home, the mental and spiritual pain got worse, because she left her home walking and returned in a wheelchair. While her whole family welcomed her home with a cake and celebration, Leesly was thinking of ways she could commit suicide.

“My life, for three years, was my room and hospitals and therapy,” she said. “I just hated my life. I was suffering so much pain.”

One place she faithfully went was to court, because the man who hit their car was being prosecuted for drunk driving.

“It was just mentally draining,” Huerta said. “It just got to the point that I couldn’t handle the physical pain anymore and the stress of everything I was dealing with.”

Her family was also dealing with their own trauma from the accident.

“This not only affected me. It affected my partner and my siblings,” she said. “My siblings were so young they started doing things that they shouldn’t to cope with all of the stress that was going on. It was so bad. It was so chaotic in the house. In front of them I just wanted to act like everything is OK. But it was just too much.”

Huerta reached a breaking point.

“I remember one day thinking this is hell and I can’t do this anymore. I tried to kill myself,” she said.

As she was getting ready to cut her wrists with a knife, she said, her mother’s friend from church reached out. She told Huerta “she better not be doing something stupid,” and that God told her to call.

“That was like the time that I was thinking, God told me he was going to leave me here for a reason,” Leesly said with emotion. “That just reminded me that God needs me. I started crying and crying.”

At this point, she also agreed to have counseling.

During another trip to the emergency room for a severe UTI, Huerta, who was now 20, learned she was pregnant. It was a complete surprise since her doctors didn’t think it was possible.

While she was scared, Huerta said she knew God was with her.

“Something just kept telling me, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I know it was God,” Huerta said. “After that I said, ‘I’m not going to focus on the hatred I have for this guy [the drunk driver]. I’m going to take care of me and I’m going to take care of my baby.’”

In the end, Leesly was able to give birth naturally to a healthy girl. That girl is now 15.

Having a child helped Huerta begin to heal in many ways.

She began doing more public speaking with Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists, or AAIM.

“I started feeling like it was a therapy for me because I was talking about the crash instead of keeping all of my feelings inside,” Leesly said.

She continues to speak at schools and events and on DUI victim panels.

Huerta has even met the man who caused the accident and was able to tell him she forgives him.

“I told him, ‘From the bottom of my heart, I’ve been praying and God helped me, and I just want you to move on,’” she said. “I will never regret talking to him and forgiving him.”

During the pandemic, she met another paraplegic, and they started Empowered Disability, a support group for other people who need wheelchairs.

She also became friends with Devices for the Disabled, a Catholic nonprofit that provides necessary medical equipment for free.

Bob Shea, co-founder of the group, calls Huerta his “hero.”

“Leesly is an inspiring young woman,” Shea said. “As one author said, ‘To live is to experience pain. To survive is to find meaning and purpose in the pain.’ She brings meaning to every person she meets.”

That isn’t easy to do when you are paralyzed, Shea said.

“There’s no way an able-bodied person can truly understand what it means to be paralyzed. You have to live it to grasp the depth of the pain and frustration,” Shea said. “And that pain doesn’t stop with the person in the wheelchair — it extends to family and friends, touching their lives in different but no less significant ways. People often see the person in the wheelchair, but they rarely notice those standing beside it.”

While Leesly Huerta still suffers constant pain, she wants to continue her advocacy for people with disabilities.

And many people have told her how her story has changed their lives, and even saved some.

“I don’t know how many lives I’ve changed or saved, but I feel this is why God kept me here,” she said.

For information about Empowered Disability, email [email protected].