At fourteen months old, a stranger\u2019s rage pressed Keith Edmonds\u2019 face against an electric heater. Third-degree burns devoured half his face. Doctors didn\u2019t expect him to live through the night. He did\u2014then spent years at the Shriners Burn Institute in Cincinnati, enduring surgery after surgery just to approximate \u201cnormal.\u201dChildhood offered no soft landing. He went into foster care, waited to be reunified with his mother, and learned his attacker received only ten years in prison. Kids stared. Some were cruel. By thirteen, he was drinking to mute the noise, a habit that followed him into his twenties with depression, addiction, and too many bad nights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On his 35th birthday\u2014July 9, 2012\u2014something inside him snapped into focus. Mid\u2013drinking binge, he decided he was done. He wanted to become a better person. He got sober and rebuilt from the ground up.Keith found his footing in corporate sales, first at Dell, then at The Coca-Cola Company, where he earned top honors and was trusted with the toughest inner-city Detroit route. People who didn\u2019t trust easily trusted him. The scars on his face told a truth his words didn\u2019t have to: he knew pain, and he wasn\u2019t going to waste it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At fourteen months old, a stranger\u2019s rage pressed Keith Edmonds\u2019 face against an electric heater. Third-degree burns devoured half his face. Doctors didn\u2019t expect him to live… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":740,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25197,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25195\/revisions\/25197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}