35: Ross was blinded by his father

In an ideal world, children should be able to trust their parents. After all, it’s the grown-ups in the family who are responsible for the kids. No child should ever have to worry about safety when mom and dad are around for protection, in an ideal world. That’s the world Ross thought he was living in when he was 8 years old, with his older brother Ryan, who was 10. They were happy kids with no reason to be afraid. Until one night at their home in Charlotte, North Carolina, when his mother told his father she wanted a divorce. That’s when something snapped in Ross’s dad’s mind, and he got a gun, and forever changed the history of their family. Ross is 21 now, and he’s permanently blind. And he’s amazing. He’s currently at the Colorado Springs Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, where he’s training to swim in the Summer 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. We talked about a lot of things – what happened that night, how he and his mother have adapted, how difficult it was to learn Braille, getting his first guide dog, how he is able to play computer video games, why he sometimes wears earplugs, and how he can swim competitively without being able to see. Ross has plans for a career in software engineering, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll meet that challenge. If you’d like to contact him, you can email Ross at [email protected]. And if you’d like to join the others who support this podcast for as little as $1 per month, you can do that at WhatWasThatLike.com/support Links: Investigation Discovery show called “Unbreakable – Live to tell” https://youtu.be/RKJwrQrCMA8 XMO speech https://youtu.be/8hsfxVIRW-A Ross’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoZujToINVP7xax9BTc7s2g Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ross.minor.5 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/minor_threat17/ Meeting and training with Dixie https://youtu.be/X1xB6-29NUU Twitter https://twitter.com/ross_minor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices