When the police found him under a Oklahoma City bridge, Danny Ellerd weighed just 42 pounds. Years later, he would have gotten to graduation with a perfect average.
At that time, however, the future had far different appearance.
Danny had spent about fifteen years trapped in addiction. He lost almost everything and ended up living on the street. When some agents found him, there were also court warrants.
They could have arrested him.
But it was enough to look at his condition to understand that there was a greater urgency. Danny needed a hospital.
The agents accompanied him to receive medical care. The doctors managed to stabilize it and intervened on a serious infection that had hit a hand.
When he left the hospital, however, there was no happy ending.
He had little more than a bag with some clothes, no home in which to return and an addiction that had occupied a huge part of his life.
The turn began from there.
Danny entered an addiction recovery program and managed to stay sober. He did not rebuild everything in a day: after so many years, starting again meant starting almost from scratch and recovering, one piece at a time, what had been lost.
Among those pieces was the studio.
He enrolled at Oklahoma State University–Oklahoma City and chose Information Systems. The result tells better than many words how much the course of his life had changed: he finished the path with an academic average of 4.0, as much as possible in the US system.
But the most significant part of his story perhaps came when he decided that his experience should not only serve him.
He began to help people with addictions and situations he knew not to have studied them on books, but to have lived them. The university recognized both its academic results and its commitment to others.
Afterwards, Danny recounted his path in a book and continued to work alongside people without a fixed abode and those who tried to get out of dependence. He also built a family.
The distance between a bridge and a university is not only measured in kilometers.
In the case of Danny Ellerd it is made of years of recovery, of daily choices, of study and of the decision to return right next to those people in which he could recognize the man who had been.
The officers who chose the hospital instead of the prison that day couldn't know where that story would come.
They only knew that, before everything else, there was a person to save before them.