ATLANTA — A former high school basketball player who thought he might never walk again took a major step in his recovery when he crossed the graduation stage last week.
Last November, Brandon Simmons, 18, was involved in a serious car crash and suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
Channel 2’s Michael Seiden sat down with the Union Grove High School basketball player to talk about the injury and his fight to move forward.
“Waking up in the hospital, not being able to move my body, of course, it felt weird,” Simmons said. “So I didn’t want to believe that it was true for a while.”
Simmons was told he had a less than 1% chance of ever having any feeling from his chest down again.
“At this point, I had to tell myself, like, ‘I got to push through this. I got to, like, live with reality that I had messed up that night,’ and I just, I can’t cry about it,” he said.
TRENDING STORIES:
- 7-year-old drowns in GA lake, 2 other kids rushed to hospital
- Murder suspect shoots girlfriend in head in East Point, goes on 2-state crime spree, police say
- Husband ran off to Costa Rica with nanny after wife’s south GA murder, GBI says
But he ended up at the Shepherd Center in Buckhead and was determined to walk again. While there, he says he started to get feeling back in his hands and legs.
After two months of physical therapy, Simmons decided he’d try to walk across the stage at his high school graduation last Saturday.
With the whole class of 2025 cheering him on and his physical therapist by his side, Simmons was able to cross the stage.
“The adrenaline of going up there, just having that, like knowing that I made it, and having everybody cheer for me,” he described.
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
©2025 Cox Media Group
