The party was a bowling birthday for his best friend, in Lafayette, Indiana. Afterward Drew loaded several friends into his truck to drive them home. It was 2005. He was sixteen years old, four months past his driver's education course, and this was ordinary — a Saturday, a few miles of familiar road, friends in the back.

The shortcut went up a hill and curved left at the top. His truck drifted onto the shoulder. He overcorrected, and it fishtailed toward the passenger side; he turned into it, and it fishtailed back. Then it barrel-rolled.

A miracle he survived at all

Drew sustained a traumatic brain injury, a fractured clavicle, a fractured scapula, a broken rib and a fractured hip. Doctors told his parents it was a miracle he had survived. They also told them he might never wake up — and that if he did, no one could predict what kind of life would be left to him.

He spent four months in intensive care. At one point he was taking a single breath every three minutes.

Ten days after the crash, he came out of the coma. He could not speak. He could not respond to anyone in the room. Then, slowly, over weeks, he began to wake up.

What he woke into is difficult to describe from the outside. In his own words: "Although I was physically 16 years old, I had the mental abilities of a newborn child."

Learning life again

He relearned how to walk. How to talk. How to feed himself and how to write — the whole inventory of ordinary things nobody thinks about until they are gone. His memory was so poor that he could not recall what he had eaten for breakfast a few hours earlier.

This is the part of a brain injury that statistics tend to flatten. Recovery is not a single event with a date on it. It is years of repetition, most of it invisible to everyone but the person doing it and the family in the room.

Drew kept going. He graduated high school in the top ten of his class. He earned an Associate Degree in Exercise Science, magna cum laude. He spent six years working as a Certified Personal Trainer, and he has spent the last eight in a physical therapy rehabilitation clinic — on the other side of the work that once was done for him.

He is raising two sons, Daxton and Callon. He is working toward certification as a Physical Therapist Assistant so that helping other people recover becomes not just where he works but what he is.

"I turned my challenges into purpose," he says.

The survivors who don't have a path forward

Drew's story is not the typical one, and that is exactly what makes it useful. He came out of his injury with a family around him, an education he could finish, and work that gave him a reason to get up. Thousands of brain injury survivors across Indiana come out of theirs with none of that.

The lives of TBI survivors are forever changed. They must adjust their lives, compensate for disabilities, and rebuild what was taken from them. And when the hospital discharges them and the therapy ends, most face a narrow set of options: a nursing home built for someone else's needs, a spare bedroom in a family member's house, or nothing at all.

Villa Licci will be a residential community in Central Indiana built specifically for adult brain injury survivors — apartments, shared gathering space, a chapel, walking paths and gardens across thirteen acres. Not a medical facility. A place to live semi-independently, among neighbors who understand what a "before and after" means because they have one too.

There are no other residences serving this exact population anywhere in the country. Not one.

Drew closes his own account with a line that could stand over the whole project: Never give up. Your story isn't over yet.

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Help build it

Villa Licci is funded entirely by people who decided these neighbors were worth building for.

• $50 helps furnish a resident's apartment
• $250 supports the community spaces where survivors will find each other
• $1,000 moves a square foot of the first residential building from drawing to reality
• $25/month makes you a monthly partner, all the way to move-in day

Give Toward Drew's Neighbors

Villa Licci is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Gifts are tax-deductible. EIN 83-0873470.