Truck-dragging victim to graduate later this month

It won't be happening quite like he once envisioned it, but a Hesperia High senior left paralyzed after he was dragged behind a truck will be graduating with his class at the end of the month.

On October 10, Aaron Horsley was riding his dirt bike down Redwood Avenue on the way home, when he was struck by a pick-up truck and dragged 200 yards. He has required months of hospitalization, skin grafts, physical therapy and is paralyzed from mid-chest down.

But despite all that, he will still cross the stage at Glen Helen Pavilion, albeit in a wheelchair.

"He's had homebound teaching this whole time," Horsley's mother Marilyn said Thursday. When he was at home, representatives of the Hesperia Unified School District taught Horsley. When he was at Loma Linda University Medical Center, the Redlands Unified School District picked up the slack. "He did all his exit testing before this."

His repeated hospitalizations and major work needed to repair a wound on his lower back that just wasn't healing have set back his physical therapy by months, as he was required to stay in bed for an additional three weeks, unable to sit up or even lay flat on his back.

"So this month and a half, he atrophied a lot. He couldn't have any physical therapy at all," Marilyn Horsley said. "He has like 100 stitches in his back. He looked like Frankenstein, the poor kid."

But he's turned a corner and is sitting up again and is back home once more, which has lifted his spirits. And like his classmates, he's looking ahead to life after graduation.

"He's looking into going to college, maybe being a motorcycle mechanic," Marilyn Horsley said. "But then, he also wants to do something to help people in his predicament, too."

The Hesperia High Class of 2008 graduates at Glen Helen Pavilion in Devore on May 29.

Beau Yarbrough can be reached at 956-7108 or at beau@hesperiastar.com.