NJ teen loses leg hours after graduation, and how you can help

This one is a heartbreaker.

Graduating high school is supposed to be exhilarating. Maybe a weekend with friends at a Jersey Shore beach house or a huge party with family. Your life is finally your own. You feel immortal and invincible, and anything seems possible.

Until you lose your leg hours after graduation. Yes, this happened. And as you’re reading this, please be thinking whether you really need that pizza tonight or that new shirt this weekend and if you could possibly help this New Jersey family through a GoFundMe.

Sammy Magee is 18 and lives in Little Egg Harbor and attended Pinelands Regional High School. Just hours after graduating on June 19 he was driving an all-terrain quad and collided with a truck.

“I got smacked, went flying, bounced off the concrete and I tried getting up and I’m like, ‘Damn, why can’t I get up?'” Sammy told app.com. “I looked down and saw my leg completely in pieces.”

That was it. Just like that. He was an amputee. At 18.

Canva (Townsquare Illustration)

As all the other graduates are waiting to start college or waiting to begin their next journey in life this young and decent man is stuck waiting for a prosthetic leg. Making things all the more difficult, he’s being raised by a single mom of three. And one of those three has autism. The mom, Rene Parker, isn’t giving up. The unbelievable strength and positive attitude her son Sammy is showing won’t let her.

“The trauma he’s sustained, the way he’s handling it, I’m amazed,” she said. “He maintains such a positive attitude.”

In addition to all the other medical bills, physical therapies, etc., the cost of a prosthetic leg will be upwards of $20,000 that they don’t have. Sammy was set to start a vo-tech postgraduate education studying construction trades and now all that is on hold. If there is anything you can do to help this young man get his future back, here’s the GoFundMe page.