Drunken driving crash victim shares story with Blinn College students
Sean Carter suffered traumatic brain injury in alcohol-related vehicle accident
March 30, 2017
It wasn’t easy for Sean Carter to tell Blinn College students how a drunk driver changed his life, but using an iPad and an automated voice, he did exactly that this week at the Brenham Campus Student Center.
Since Carter was severely injured in a 2005 single-car accident, he and his mother Jenny have traveled around the country to share their story with other young people.
At the time of his accident, Carter had a modeling career that helped pay for college. When he was 22, Sean Carter was the passenger in a truck with a drunk driver who drove off the road and struck a tree. Carter suffered a shattered pelvis, broken femur, and a collapsed lung, but it was a head injury that took away Sean’s ability to speak without assistance. Sean now speaks by typing messages on an iPad, which then reads his words aloud with an automated voice.
“I sit here thinking how I was just like all of you once,” Carter said. “The choices I made put me in this situation.”
Carter told the students that his mother always told him to not drink and drive or to get into a vehicle with someone who has been drinking, but he ignored her advice that night. Carter slipped into a coma the night of the crash, spent 39 days in a hospital bed, and has worked hard to regain movement in his legs and arms. His mother quit her job to take care of him around the clock.
“I hope that you can take something away from our story today,” Jenny Carter told the Blinn students in attendance. “I want you to think of the decisions that you make that can change your life after you leave this building.”
Sean can sit in a chair on his own now and can walk with the assistance of a walker, but until two years ago he was confined to a wheel chair.
“Everyone in this room probably thinks like I thought,” Sean Carter said. “I thought that something like this could never happen to me.”
Carter admitted that after the crash he was angry and battled depression.
“I don’t know why God left me here, but I do know that I am going to enjoy every last breath,” he said. “I have the same dreams as many of you of getting a good job, falling in love, and getting married and having kids.”
For more information regarding Jenny and Sean Carter, visit their website atwww.whenseanspeaks.com.
