The last two months have been amazing for 38-year-old Jason Ray.  He finally left his Davenport home, he made new friends and regularly traveled down to the nearby Moose Lodge and convenience store for outings.  

Ray is paralyzed and when he recently bought a motorized wheelchair, he felt like he had an important element of his life back.  

His freedom.  

That was taken away again early Saturday morning.

Ray was on his way home around 1:30 a.m.  

He had just left the Moose Lodge after meeting up with some friends.  

He hadn’t been drinking and was operating his wheelchair on the shoulder of US Highway 17-92 when he heard the car coming.  

The next thing he knew, he was laying on the side of the road. The driver never stopped.

Ray suffered a spinal cord injury eight years ago while horsing around with some friends in Panama City.  

He was in a shallow lake when he jumped to splash his pals.  

He landed in the water the wrong way, and that was it.  

“Somehow, I just had the right angle and scraped my head the bottom,” said Ray lying in his bed.  “And it was just enough to kink it and explode C7, which is your neck bone.” 

So when the accident happened on Saturday morning, initially, Ray didn’t feel a thing. He knew he was hit and he knew the driver who hit him didn’t stop.  

What to do, he wondered?  

“I was thinking about different means to get myself out of that situation, contact someone. My phone, I’ve got a radio that was playing on my phone while I was traveling,” said Ray.  

“After the car hit me and I was on the ground, the phone was still playing the radio, so I had entertainment but I reached back and couldn’t reach it. “

Thirty minutes when by before anyone stopped to see if he was okay.  

Once paramedics arrived, they rushed him to the hospital where doctors determined he had two broken legs and a host of other bumps and bruises.  

“I mean, it’s just little scrapes, no major thing, but this whole arm because it was my left side, my left rear that got struck.”

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the case.  

Detectives recovered parts of the vehicle that hit Ray, but haven’t located it or its driver.  

Ray hopes the driver does the right thing and turns him or herself in.  

He says he doesn’t feel anger towards the person who hit him. Quite the opposite, he says.  

“That would give me a cause or a reason to express to the judge, I’m sure they’d ask me how I feel about the situation, possibly, to be lenient.”

In the meantime, Jason Ray is back in bed, back where he was before the purchase of his miraculous wheels.  

The family has set up a GoFundMe account to raise funds for a new wheelchair and the dollars are now starting to trickle in.  

Ray believes if the driver is eventually caught, perhaps insurance might cover the cost of a replacement wheelchair.  

Perhaps then, he will regain the freedom he lost early Saturday morning.