Editor’s note: For five weeks, we are profiling two young people each week who are making a difference in the South Bend region. Whether they are already in the spotlight or escaping much public attention for their efforts, these young people are putting in the work to make their neighbors’ lives better. Check them out every Sunday and Tuesday online and Monday and Wednesday in print.
SOUTH BEND â For a long time after the crash, Giuliana Mendez felt like God must be punishing her.
When she was 12, her father died following a yearslong battle with addiction.
Just over a year later, Giuliana rode in a car with her mother to take four of her younger siblings to a babysitter. It was a Friday night in February. The plan was for Giuliana, who started dance classes around age 4, to get her first pair of pointe shoes the next morning.
Police had pulled over a 32-year-old man earlier that same Friday after his white Buick Century slid off the road on Crumstown Highway, southwest of South Bend. A 911 caller said he appeared drunk. Two officers asked him to take a sobriety test.
But in a decision that would later lead the two officers to resign and St. Joseph County to pay Giuliana’s family $10,000, they didn’t force the driver to prove he was sober. They merely made him leave his car at the scene and call someone to pick him up.
About four hours later, around 7:45 p.m., the same man was behind the wheel of the same white SUV near the same road. With no headlights on, he crossed over the median line heading east â directly into the path of a vehicle carrying Giuliana, her four siblings and their mother, Kassandra Zwierzynski.
The other driver, Stephen Stopczynski, died in the crash. His blood-alcohol content was found to be 0.15, nearly twice the legal limit.
Giuliana’s siblings and her mother suffered only minor injuries. But the impact broke Giuliana’s back, paralyzing her from the waist down. Instead of trying on her first pair of pointe shoes the next morning, she found herself awaiting the first of multiple surgeries. Doctors said she would never walk again.
“For a while, I was really lost in my faith and just in general, because I felt like I had done something to deserve that,” Giuliana, soon to be a senior at St. Joseph High School, told The Tribune in a recent interview. “Or maybe I was just, like, doomed to be on some bad path, some unlucky path. Maybe there’s no luck for me.”
More than three years after the 2021 crash, Giuliana will turn 17 the first week of July. She still cannot walk. She uses a wheelchair with pink spokes and light-up swivel wheels. She can lift her legs using her hip flexors, but she feels nothing below that point. Out in public, she is mostly confined to her seat.
After two months in the hospital, she made headlines when she got home and vowed to walk again. The TV cameras came again a year later, when she prepared for her first dance recital in a wheelchair.
But the past year has been remarkable in a different way. She chose to stop taking dance classes. The oldest of six siblings, she’s channeled her love for kids into a job at a child care center after school. She’s working to earn her driver’s license. And while she strives to walk again, she’s begun to work in earnest toward an independent life in a wheelchair. She spends more time thinking about college than she does about walking.
She’s learning, in short, how to live with loss. How to accept what she can no longer do, for now, so she doesn’t end up stuck.
Earlier this spring, she told her story in front of a room full of middle schoolers at the Stanley Clark School in South Bend. It was the first time she’d shared her full perspective on what happened to her.
In many ways, Giuliana insists, she’s just a teenager trying to answer an age-old question: Who do I want to be?
In her case, finding the answer means grappling with extraordinary trauma while refusing to allow it to define her.
‘I’m supposed to be in there’
Lori South has owned Creative Dance N’, a studio in South Bend whose members range from two-year-olds to adults, for 25 years. Giuliana was a staple of her youth classes, she said, for nearly half that time.
Early on, Giuliana said, dance appealed because it felt unique. While most kids put their energy toward sports like softball or basketball, she showed prowess as a dancer. She was well-coordinated and lively. Her friends wanted to sit and chat on the playground; she preferred to play tag.
She tried a number of styles: hip hop, jazz, modern, tap and ballet. As she grew older, though, she developed a taste for lyrical dance, a form known for blending elements of each to convey poignant moods.
“I felt like it became a way to express my emotions,” Giuliana said of dance. “On a tough day, when Iâm at dance class, I wasnât thinking about anything else.”
Giuliana stood out on a stage, South said. Younger kids sought to emulate her. She and her friends would seemingly try any move. They would light up the studio with their spunky confidence and laugh off their mistakes.
“If she would say, ‘I canât do that,'” South said of Giuliana, “it wasnât because she wasnât going to try it.”
Giuliana returned to the studio months after the crash to see her friends, who held her hand and pulled her around in her wheelchair, South remembers. She enrolled in classes again that fall with the goal of dancing in the next year’s recital.
In June of 2022, Giuliana was carried onstage along with her wheelchair in a national competition in Ohio. Wearing a white dress, she danced for more than two minutes to Lady Gaga’s “Angel Down,” gradually lifting herself from the floor to stacked platforms to the seat of her wheelchair. She finished with her right hand over her heart, her left hand reaching out toward the audience. She flashed a smile.
“It brought everybody to tears,” South said. “We took it to nationals that year and the judges were crying because she so beautifully depicted how she was not going to stay down.”
But last year, Giuliana decided to take some time away from dance.
For nearly a decade of her life, dance had meant jumping in the air, twisting through sharp turns, gliding across the stage. Now she had use of only her upper body. It was hard to be so limited.
Watching her lifelong friends work to master new moves without her became too painful, she said.
“They look so beautiful doing it,” Giuliana said. “And Iâm supposed to be in there, and Iâm not. I canât.”
Determined to walk, Giuliana faces harsh reality
The dilemma about how tightly to cling to her old life began for Giuliana at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, where she was airlifted after the crash.
Giuliana’s mom says medical staff were quick to encourage her that she could live a rich life in a wheelchair. She could dance in a wheelchair.
Zwierzynski, who works as a nurse, understood the extent of Giuliana’s paralysis. But she was unmoored by a doctor’s assessment that her daughter would never walk again. How could she extinguish her 13-year-old girl’s hope to return to a semblance of the life she knew?
“I didn’t want anybody to tell her never,” Zwierzynski said.
She found a companion in Jeff Lefkovitz, an exercise specialist who founded the Abilities Recovery Center near Los Angeles, where Giuliana has made several trips to use a machine that allows her to walk with assistance.
Lefkovitz said he started the center in 2017 after helping a man who had lost the ability to use all four limbs. Though the man was about 60 years old, he couldn’t live independently and relied on his family to care for him. After two years of training with an early version of a device Lefkovitz patented, called the MĂS, the man could stand and move a short distance with a walker.
Lefkovitz, who’s not a doctor but says he’s worked in neurological rehabilitation for more than a decade, said many of his clients have been told they’ll never walk again. But he and his team of “tireless optimists,” as the center’s website puts it, believe that many people can better cope with their disability if they know exactly how capable they are of movement.
“If you never give somebody a chance to succeed,” Lefkovitz said, “how do you know whether or not they can?”
Aided by the machine, Giuliana has taken shaky steps. She’s also pedaled an exercise bike. Both activities felt nearly as satisfying as the exertion of dancing, she said.
She also does more traditional physical therapy at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a research hospital in Chicago affiliated with Northwestern University. The main goal of her ongoing work there is to learn wheelchair skills like going up and down ramps, negotiating curbs, and rolling through various doorways.
Madeline Smith, a physical therapist who’s worked with Giuliana for about a year and a half, said she struggled at first to accept how her injury would limit her. The initial focus was on little else beyond how she could walk again.
But Smith said she’s noticed a change in Giuliana’s attitude. She’s come to see her wheelchair as less of an obstacle to the world and more of a tool that enables her to keep exploring.
As Giuliana prepares to attend college, Smith said, she hopes to allow her to practice navigating downtown Chicago independently. (âIf you can navigate downtown Chicago,” Smith says, “you can navigate just about any environment.”)
âAcceptance, whether it’s an injury or pretty much anything in life, is really complex,” Smith said. “I think as a clinician, the best you can do is to educate and guide a patient toward getting there.”
âI try not to focus on what a patient cannot do,” Smith added, “and rather what they can do.”
A girl with goals beyond her wheelchair
Giuliana didn’t want the kids at Stanley Clark School to leave her talk with the idea that she had fully resolved her trauma. She didn’t want them to view her as a flawless beacon of hope and inspiration.
She wanted them to see her â a fellow moody teenager who can be stubborn and angry about her limitations, but who is also deeply thoughtful and resilient in the face of adversity. She wanted them to see a determined young person who happens to be in a wheelchair, but whose goals aren’t defined by that fact.
“You feel like you have to be this certain person or you’re doomed to be this certain person because of like, what you’ve been through. Like, my dad died ⌠when I was 12. I was paralyzed at 13,” Giuliana said.
“None of those things,” she added, “say what’s in a person’s heart.”
Nathaniel King, director of student services and leadership at Stanley Clark, said he invited Giuliana to come speak to help teens reflect on the reality that they’re not invincible. But Giuliana’s story also shows that they need not live in fear that some tragedy will upend their plans for their lives, he said.
“She went from questioning, asking why, and not really seeing herself being able to do the things she was able to do before,” King said, “to then being grateful for the support system that she has, grateful that she’s still here today.”
South, who leads Giuliana’s old dance studio, is convinced that Giuliana could make an excellent dance teacher one day. But she also believes her former student will inspire others and make a difference in whatever realm calls to her.
Regardless, the dancer’s mentality isn’t likely to leave her. Two months after the crash, when she finally got home from the hospital, she said in an interview that she was optimistic about her recovery because “I can do whatever I put my mind to â which Iâve heard that my whole life. Iâm a dancer.”
Smith, Giuliana’s physical therapist and a former dancer herself, said there may be something to that. She believes the bodily awareness Giuliana developed on the dance floor has eased her transition to a largely independent life in a wheelchair.
Giuliana said she often looks at life the way she looked at a pirouette. No, she couldn’t go from one to four consecutive twirls in a day. But with time and discipline, she could change. She could grow.
She’s planning for college, where she thinks she might want to study art therapy. She’s fewer than 50 practice hours away from earning her driver’s license. She went to prom this spring in a black dress, finding the dance itself pretty boring but enjoying the after-party.
Through the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, she’s becoming a certified scuba diver, a process that will culminate with a dive in Key Largo, a Floridian island off the coast.
Walking remains a dream of Giuliana’s. She may even move to California for college and spend more time working out at the Abilities Recovery Center, she said.
But she won’t live in spite of the tragedy that struck her.
Of walking, she said: “I still think itâs something I could work for. I still think I could improve. But itâs not, like, the center of my day or my thoughts anymore.
“I mean,” she noted, “Iâve got other things to do.”
Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jordantsmith09
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Giuliana Mendez, paralyzed in car accident, recovers in wheelchair
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