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Education

Three Years Ago, a Drive-by Threatened His Life; This Week, He Graduates High School

Rowan Moore Gerety
Aaron Willis, paralyzed in a drive-by shooting in 2012, graduated from high school this week.

As a high school freshman, Aaron Willis was paralyzed from the waist down in a drive-by shooting while riding his bike in Wynwood. Wednesday, Willis graduated from Booker T Washington High School on the honor roll.

 

Willis wore a look of sheer determination as he walked across the stage to claim his diploma, walking with the aid of crutches and robotic leg supports. The friends and classmates who filled the auditorium lost it, their screams gradually coalescing into chants of “Aaron, Aaron.”

 

Willis, who began ninth grade as a promising young talent on the football team, has had to use a wheelchair for more than three years. But in sessions with the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, he has gradually learned to walk again with the help of a device nicknamed a ‘robotic exoskeleton’ for the way its scaffold-like structure acts as a sheath for injured legs. Wednesday, his classmates saw him walk again for the first time.

 

“I could have died back in 2012, and I could have died some other times after that,” Willis said. “But I’m still here and I graduated: I stuck in there, I never gave up, and I always, I always tried to pep-talk myself.”

 

“No one really expected Aaron to make it this far,” Willis’ father Sammie said tearfully. “They didn’t realize he had a mom named Katherine and a Daddy named Sammie, and this is what we’re here for. This is the milestone, the first one.”

The next milestone, Sammie Willis said, will come when Aaron starts at Florida International University  later this year with a $26,000 scholarship. He plans to study marketing and psychology.

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