PHILADELPHIA — At the moment his life changed forever, Ather Sharif was sleeping in the backseat of a southbound car on a wintry North Dakota highway. It was March 2013, somewhere between Grand Forks and Fargo.
“It was nowhere,” said Sharif, 33, a software developer from Pakistan who was studying for a master’s degree at the University of North Dakota at the time. “What I was told is there were icy roads and that it was a bad break, a slip of the tires. That was it, nothing dramatic.”
He woke up paralyzed. Within a few weeks, Sharif was loaded into an air ambulance and flown to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia — to begin again. He learned to use a wheelchair and found his mission.
