Posted: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:30 PM - 102,925 Readers
By: Jeremy Schwartz
The buzz starts as soon as Jacqui Saburido enters the hotel ballroom. As she makes her way to the podium, a crowd gathers around her, snapping pictures, clamoring for a hug. "I saw you on Oprah!" someone exclaims.
photo by Rodolfo GonzalezJacqueline Saburido met with Reggie Stephey, the man who caused the crash that disfigured her, in San Antonio on Aug. 14. They declined to give details of the conversation.She takes her seat and prepares to speak. She looks out at the 200 or so attendees with unblinking, lidless eyes. She has no nose, no ears, no face to speak of. A black bowler hat covers the tender skin of her skull. She looks fragile, as though she might break, but her voice emerges confident and assured.
For 20 minutes she tells the story of how a drunken driver shattered her life in 1999. The crowd, mostly toughened law enforcement agents who already know her story, sniffle quietly and dab at their eyes. When she finishes, they leap to their feet to give her a sustained standing ovation.
Saburido is a rock star here at the Save a Life Summit, a traffic safety conference sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation. The people in this room in the Westin Riverwalk Hotel speak of her in reverential tones.
"Jacqui has probably been the most effective person, program or campaign to help us deter drinking and driving," said Linda Tomasini, a safety contract specialist for TxDOT in San Antonio. "She's a hero to a lot of people."
But away from the crowd, Saburido says her life is not a tidy inspirational story. She has spent much of the past three years shut inside her Caracas, Venezuela, apartment, sometimes losing the battle to get out of bed in the morning.
The promise of the first years after the accident — the constant hope that the next surgery would restore her old life — gave way to a numbing sameness, the depressing realization that while her friends and peers were getting married and starting careers and families, her life was not changing.
Years after the accident, she still could not accept that this was her body, her face, her life. Her limitations grew large in her mind: Why couldn't she drive at night or live without constant help from her father? Why couldn't she dance and go to the beach like she used to? Why did it happen to her?
After the conference ended, she went upstairs to a hotel room to film a public service announcement for a new anti-drunken driving campaign. An assistant applied pink makeup to her white face. She looked into the camera and spoke clearly.
"I need to get the strength to keep going," she said. "The most important thing is to regain my faith in God. Otherwise, I can be lost forever."
In a few weeks she would check herself back into a South Florida hospital — not for another surgery, but to return to the therapists and support groups she hopes will help her find peace.
Ten years ago, Saburido was a beautiful, 20-year-old woman from a wealthy family, studying English in Austin and taking a break from engineering classes at a Caracas university. On the night of Sept. 19, 1999, she went to a party on Lake Travis. She stayed late, dancing merengue and salsa, and about 4 a.m. she and three friends caught a ride with a young Russian student back into the city.
At the same time, Reggie Stephey, an 18-year-old wide receiver at Lake Travis High School, was driving home from another party in Austin. He had been drinking.
On a curve along RM 2222, Stephey's 1996 Yukon SUV plowed into the car carrying Saburido and her friends. The crash killed the driver, Natalia Chyptchak Bennett, and Laura Guerrero, a 20-year-old University of Texas student from Colombia. Two other passengers were pulled from the wrecked car as it burst into flames.
Saburido, trapped in the front passenger seat, burned for nearly a minute before paramedics could put out the fire. Horrific burns covered nearly her entire body, except for the bottom of her legs and feet. She spent months at a Galveston burn unit, undergoing skin grafts and emergency surgeries. One by one her lips, ears and nose fell off. Her eyes were sewn shut so they wouldn't dry out. The dead bone of her fingers was amputated.
Her father, Amadeo, became her caregiver, shuttling his only child to countless doctors appointments, massaging her scars, brushing her teeth and applying eyedrops in the middle of the night.
In June 2001, a jury found Stephey guilty of two counts of intoxication manslaughter and sentenced him to 7 years in prison. At a meeting during the trial, Saburido asked to meet with Stephey; she told Stephey she forgave him. He served every year of his sentence before being released in June 2008.
Meanwhile, the story of Saburido's accident, and her valiant efforts to overcome her injuries, began to seize the public imagination. In May 2002, the American-Statesman published a 16,000-word special section detailing Saburido's story.
The section has since been reproduced more than 200,000 times and has been distributed to high school students throughout the state. Her story became the subject of an anti-drunken driving campaign by TxDOT featuring videos, posters and a dramatic public service announcement showing Saburido slowly lowering a photograph of her pretty, unburned face to reveal her disfigured countenance.
"It went national, international," said Terry Pence, TxDOT's traffic safety director. "People just embraced the story. It's the hardest-hitting campaign (TxDOT) has ever been involved in."
Soon high school teachers were using Saburido's story as a teaching tool in Texas health classes; a judge in Australia was sentencing drunken drivers to watch videos featuring Saburido; a state trooper in Florida taped her poster to the inside of his patrol cars so Saburido's burned face stared back at drunken-driving suspects.
In 2003, Saburido told her story on the Oprah Winfrey Show. So powerful was Saburido's appearance that it was replayed on Winfrey's 20th anniversary show in 2005 as Winfrey told the audience of the "profound effect" Saburido had on her.
Janet Lea, senior vice-president of Sherry Matthews Advocacy Marketing, which put together the "Before and After" TxDOT campaign featuring Saburido, estimates as many as a billion people have seen Saburido's story.
"Her story has touched the world," said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "She is known everywhere you go. ... I think she has one of the most impactful stories anywhere."
Saburido estimates that she's had nearly 100 surgeries since her accident. Cornea and stem cell transplants in both eyes have dramatically improved her vision, and her fingers and thumb have been surgically extended on her left hand, allowing her to use them to push buttons.
But the surgeries didn't fix what she had lost. She looks much the same as she did 10 years ago. At a certain point, she said, exhaustion set in. "I got tired of trying to find doctors, of looking, looking, looking," she said.
After stints living in Kentucky and Florida to be near doctors, she returned to her native Caracas a few years ago, to the apartment she shares with her father.
"When you return home, and you see that your friends have lives, that they've gotten married and have jobs, and I'm home alone, you see the reality of the situation."
Ironically, her better vision contributed to her depression. "I have more independence, but in a way it caused more emotional pain," she said. "When I see better, I see how my body is. I see how other people can do many things I cannot."
It also wasn't easy being disfigured in her country. Beauty contests are a national pastime in Venezuela, where national pride and identity are very much tied up in its performance at international competitions. Last month, Stefania Fernandez won the Miss Universe competition, the second year in a row a Venezuelan has taken the crown and the sixth time in the past 59 years.
"This is a country where the aesthetic is very important," Saburido said. "People look. I feel like I have been more accepted by the older people."
As Saburido's fame grew, she was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the world's first face transplant. In the early and mid-2000s, doctors in the United States and Europe were competing to be the first to perform a full face transplant, a controversial procedure in which a corpse's face is attached to the patient, reconnecting nerve endings and blood vessels.
Psychologists worried about the emotional effects of attaching a dead person's face to another person, but Saburido initially expressed interest in the procedure.
"I got so excited that I kept saying: 'I want it! I want it right now!" she told London's Sunday Mail newspaper in 2004. "Nobody wants to be ugly do they? And for me every day is hard, because whenever I see a beautiful face, or soft skin, I remember what I had."
A French woman became the first to receive a face transplant in 2005.
Saburido said she decided against the transplant because of the side effects of the anti-rejection drugs she would have to take for the rest of her life. She worried they would increase her chances of cancer and arthritis.
But the bigger concern was that the drugs would render her unable to have children. She remains driven by her hope to have a family of her own, to "find a wonderful soul" to be with her.
Three years ago, her mother, Rosalia, died of cancer.
Her parents were divorced, but Saburido's mother spent her last months in the home Saburido shared with her father.
"For me, it made me feel impotent that I couldn't care for her like any other person because of my impediments," Saburido said.
After her mother died, things got worse. "Because of my mom's death, it affects me, how I am," she said. "I get depressed."
For three years, Saburido said, she rarely left her apartment. She had given occasional talks about the dangers of drunken driving in Caracas, including one at her old high school, but she stopped her public speaking. She grew distant from friends.
"Every day was worse," she said. "I didn't want to get out of bed. I argued with my dad, with other people. It wasn't life."
Then last December, she turned 30. In the best of situations, that milestone birthday is a time of self-reflection.
"Accepting that I was 30 was very hard," Saburido said. "I knew I had no career, no family of my own except my father, that I hadn't lived, that I hadn't enjoyed. I don't feel like a responsible, mature person of 30. Emotionally, I haven't been able to go forward."
When she hears that the man who caused her so much pain has enrolled in college after leaving prison, she said she has mixed emotions.
"I don't know if I have anger," she said. "I know he didn't mean to hurt anybody, but to tell you I feel good he's studying? Maybe it makes me a little envious that he's getting along with his life."
Reggie Stephey looks like a man burdened. With his lined face and stubbled chin, he looks older than his 28 years. He's trying to put his life back together after nearly eight years in prison.
Throughout his prison stint, he collaborated with Saburido on the drunken driving campaign, filming public service announcements and speaking to high schools. He was the other half of the equation, a walking cautionary tale. Law enforcement officials say Stephey was nearly as vital to the success of the campaign as Saburido. A high school football player with all-American looks, Stephey was someone potential drunken drivers could relate to.
Since being released from prison last year, Stephey has been trying to put the pieces of his own life together.
"It's a long road," he said recently, handrolling cigarettes from a bag of Bugler tobacco. "I'm starting out basically 10 years behind in terms of trying to figure out my place in the world."
He enrolled at the University of Texas last spring as a junior after getting associate degrees in philosophy and business while in prison. He works construction jobs on the side.
He said he will forever carry the burden of being responsible for two deaths and Saburido's disfigurement. But he seems determined to move past the accident.
"It's defined a large part of my life, but it doesn't define who I am," he said.
Stephey met with Saburido while she was in San Antonio in mid-August, the first time they had seen each other since the trial. Neither will go into detail about what they talked about in a hotel room above the Riverwalk for more than an hour.
"I think it went well," Stephey said. "It was emotionally draining. I'm still reeling from it. ... My struggles don't compare to the struggles Jacqui goes through on a daily basis."
It's Friday morning at Lakeway Municipal Court, and defendants file past twin posters: one of Saburido, a closeup from nearly a decade ago with her left eye seared shut, and another of pre-accident Stephey in his Lake Travis football uniform. Most of the people coming before Municipal Judge Kevin Madison are here for traffic infractions and other minor offenses. Others are teenagers who have been caught with alcohol. For them, Madison has a special sentence.
A pretty 15-year-old girl with long chestnut hair is called to the bench, accompanied by her frowning father. The girl faces a charge of minor in possession of alcohol. Madison orders her to take home a binder containing the original American-Statesman article and videos of Saburido and Stephey. And like every other teen who goes before Madison on alcohol-related charges, she's ordered to write a four-page essay about the story.
Madison said that while it's hard to scientifically judge the impact of the Saburido story on the kids, the message seems to be getting through.
"I think it particularly has an impact on kids in Lakeway, because Reggie Stephey went to Lake Travis High School, and he wasn't someone who ran around drinking all the time," Madison said. "He was a guy who made a very, very bad decision. What impacts them is the fact that Reggie looks like them."
One high-schooler recently wrote an essay for the judge. "I will not be the next Reggie because I couldn't handle knowing I did something to another person like what happened to Jacqui," the boy wrote. "She could have so easily been a vegetable for the rest of her life. ... If I was her, I could never be able to show my face, I would lock myself in the room and wait for death. She is not the same way and I respect her so much for that."
Until a few months ago, Saburido felt like she was trapped in a labyrinth with no exit. Her family and friends could finally take it no more and urged her to look for help. Her father's girlfriend told her about an intensive therapy program in Florida. Saburido resisted. Her loved ones kept hounding her.
"They told me I couldn't continue like this," she said.
So earlier this year, Saburido and her father boarded a plane for South Florida. She checked herself into a hospital and began a three-month program featuring intensive counseling, group therapy and meditation. She lived in a small, hospital-owned cottage virtually closed off from the outside world.
"What's important is the treatment, to get to know oneself and why you feel certain things."
She said her mind still sabotages her, the negativity lurks nearby. But she said she is feeling more hopeful than she has in years. She talks of beginning an anti-drunken driving campaign in Venezuela and becoming more involved in the movement in the U.S.
"I'd like to be happy with myself, to accept myself how I am and be more independent," she said.
She is taking small steps toward that independence: her trip to San Antonio was her first major trip without her father, a cross-hemispheric flight from Caracas to Atlanta to San Antonio that she navigated by herself. "It was a personal challenge," she said.
"I'm trying to get on track," she said. "It was a life I didn't want to live, but it's the life I have now. Life keeps on going, and we can't stop it."
