Six months ago, Josie Ratley was on the edge of death. She had been severely beaten by a 15 year old classmate after a series of text messages between the two teens. Wayne Tracey, who pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, allegedly stomped on Josie’s head repeatedly with his steal toed boots in addition to punching and kicking the girl. Allegedly, Tracey snapped after a text message about his brother, who committed suicide the year before.
Now Josie looks much like a normal teenage girl, but she is still struggling to recover from the sever brain damage caused by the beating.
“It’s kind of like if you have a jigsaw puzzle and you throw it all over the table, that’s what happened to her brain,” her therapist, Alicia Ann Fosse, told the Today Show. “And now we’re putting the puzzle back together piece by piece.”
Josie is relearning simple things, like the alphabet and the colors of the rainbow. She struggles with blue, though she does know that it’s in the sky. Her mother, Hilda Gotay, wants nothing more than to see her daughter back to the person she was before the attack.
“I’m looking forward for more progress,” Gotay said in the “Today” interview, with tears in her eyes. “I would love to see her the way she was. She has a lot to learn. A lot to learn.”
It’s still unclear how much Josie will recover.
“They don’t know if it’s going to be 100 percent. They don’t know if it’s 40, 50,” Gotay said. “We are all, of course, striving for the 100.”
