College students on the Central Coast are creating prosthetics for a boy who lost his fingers in a fiery car crash.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo engineering students are working on a pair of prosthetic hands for 10-year-old Julian Reynoso.
Mechanical engineering student Ryan Kissinger is leading a team of fellow students to create a bionic hand with motorized fingers.
"What had started as an endeavor in engineering and became something a lot more than that. I believe it became a message, not only to Julian and his family and to his mother but also to the community, that goodness will triumph over tragedy," he says.
In April 2019, Reynoso and his family were driving in Los Angeles when a suspected drunken driver ran a red light and plowed into their vehicle, dragging it 25 feet before it caught fire. The boy and his mother survived, but his father, and younger sister and brother were killed. Eighty-five percent of the boy’s body was burned.