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At 17, after drinking homemade wine all day, Bobby and a friend stole a brand new car.
When his friend crashed the car into a tree, Bobby flew out the windshield, into a ditch.
The impact put him in a coma for nine days. "When I regained consciousness, I realized my
arm and my wrist had been split wide open, leaving horrific gashes and my ear was severed."
He lost so much blood that the emergency surgical team put in nine pints of plasma to keep him
alive. As fast as they put in plasma it would pour out again! He also had a broken hip and pelvis
and a serious concussion that resulted in a temporary memory loss. It looked as if the boy were
doomed. "God had His hand on my life that day," Bobby acknowledges. "He kept me alive."
His long coma could have been the lead-up to his early death, but miraculously Bobby slowly
recovered. He suffered no hearing loss and after months of painful physiotherapy he regained
the full use of his hand and arm.

On his 19th birthday, Bobby was so depressed he voluntarily signed himself into the suicide
ward of the mental hospital. Nightmares were haunting him. Bobby was given electro-shock
treatments to prevent him from remembering his violent past. Not surprisingly, it didn't help.

By 21 the police had locked Bobby up several times for drunkenness and robbery. He decided
to join the military, but just didn't fit in, and was given an honourable discharge ten months later.
His two dark secrets still controlled his life. Bobby buried his dark past that he always assumed
he murdered his mom, and was assaulted at ten- years of age. Children suffer from abuse.
This is a chilling example.

Within two years of his discharge from the army, Bobby was arrested for B&E and cheque
forgery, and thrown into a maximum-security federal penitentiary for two years. At age 23 he
never told anyone he was in prison so obviously he never received mail or visitors. "I was so
lonely," he remembers. Worst of all were the terrifying scenes that Bobby had to witness while
in the penitentiary, for the entire two years. Killings, beatings, sexual assaults... it would take
nothing short of a miracle for this miserable man to come out whole, healthy, and heading
forward on the right path. "I saw horrific things there — things that I could never share," he said.
Somehow, however, he took the opportunity to give up smoking; he kicked the booze; and he
decided that he could create as bright a future as he could imagine.

Bobby left at the end of his sentence having two years sobriety, with his tailor-made 'prison' suit,
plus the $80 he had saved. He was 25, more hopeful, but still haunted by nightmares.

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