SALT LAKE CITY — Brynnli Cherry is alive, but it's been a very long road to recovery.
In 2015 a drunk driver blew through a stop sign in Hooper, Utah and hit the SUV she was a passenger in.
Brynnli was thrown out of the vehicle and received massive injuries.
Her mom recalls the moment she got to the emergency room. "The whole E.R. room was just chaos. You could just tell there was so much chaos going on and when you focus in on the room it was happening in and realize it was Brynnli, it just sunk me," says Kerri Conley.
21 surgeries later, Brynnli's adjusting to her new normal which means being totally blind. She went from playing soccer one day to not being able to the next.
"A lot of people think that drunk driving isn't that big of a deal, if they get behind it once they think oh it'll be fine...nothing bad will happen but that was not the case in my situation," Brynnli says.
Zero Fatalities say crashes involving drunk drivers are four times more likely to be fatal. 28 people die every day in the United States in an impaired crash. That's one every 51 minutes.
Lt. Nick Street with the Utah Highway Patrol has seen his share of DUI crashes and says it really comes down to planning.
Lt. Street says, "Make good decisions on the front end of a night where you know you're going to be consuming or using an impairing substance and insure that you've already got that ride home taken care of before you go somewhere else."
Brynnli is all about planning too - planning her future. She's a student body officer at her high school and has dreams to go off to college.
For more information about what you can do to keep yourself and your family safe on Utah roads, please visit zerofatalities.com
