No Room for Vengeance

Victoria Ruvolo, forty-five, of Lake Ronkonkoma, New York, was driving to her niece’s voice recital when she passed a car driven by Ryan Cushing, nineteen. Cushing was with five other teens and had just used a stolen credit card to go on a spending spree. One of their purchases was a frozen turkey, which Cushing decided to toss into oncoming traffic. The twenty-pound bird smashed through Ruvolo’s windshield, crushing her face.

Ruvolo survived, though it took ten hours of surgery to repair her face and months of painful rehabilitation. The doctors had to put three titanium plate in her left cheek and one in her right cheek and a wire mesh to hold her left eye in place because her eye socket was badly damaged.

On October 17, 2005, Ruvolo attended Cushing’s sentencing and asked his judge for leniency. Part of her statement read, “Despite all the fear and the pain, I have learned from this horrific experience that I have much to be thankful for. Each day when I wake up, I thank God simply because I’m alive. I sincerely hope you have also learned from this awful experience, Ryan. There is no room for vengeance in my life, and I do not believe a long, hard prison term would do you, me, or society any good.”

As soon as the case was over, Cushing started to approach Ruvolo.  Every officer in the courtroom was ready to jump on him.  But as he walked over to where Ruvolo was sitting, she said in her book, "I saw that all he was doing was crying, crying profusely. He looked at me and said, ‘I never meant this to happen to you, I prayed for you every day. I’m so glad you’re doing well.’ Then this motherly instinct just came over me and all I could do was take him and cuddle him like a child and tell him ‘just do something good with your life, take this experience and do something good with your life.’"

Cushing, who wept and expressed remorse for his action, was sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation of community service and psychiatric help.  He could have gotten a twenty-five-year prison sentence if Ruvolo had not intervened.

 — Leah Ingram, “Compassionate Victim,” beliefnet.com (December 2005) and Victoria Ruvolo, No Room for Vengeance in Justice and Healing (No Vengence Press, 2011)