After a horrifying bombing in his native Bosnia, Sead Bekric turned his experience into something productive.
LARGO – Sead Bekric, a Largo businessman, finished his last meeting for the day and stopped at a coffee shop for a drink.
His brother, Enver, held the door for him and headed to the counter to order coffee after Sead took a seat at a table.
It has been a long day for them both, but Sead still smiled when his brother returned with the drinks.
“Working with your brother is like having a wife,” Bekric jokes. “We growl at each other.”
Originally from Bosnia, Sead came to America 14 years ago after shrapnel from a bomb took his eyesight and most of his face. Bekric had been a refugee in a town of Srebrenica, a town where some of the worst genocides on European soil happened.
Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, a long series of conflicts between the remaining republics would later be identified as the War in Bosnia began in 1992. One year after the fighting started, the United Nations stepped in and enforced a cease-fire between the Bosnian and Serb forces.
With the guns no longer shooting, Bekric and several of his friends decided to take advantage of the break and headed out to a field to play soccer on an April afternoon. Bekric recalled it had been a beautiful day.
And then the bomb went off.
Something caused the cease-fire to break down and an explosion went off in the field, killing 62 children and wounding 152 others. Bekric was hit with shrapnel on the left side of his face, breaking his skull into 24 pieces.
“I was ready to be a goner,” Bekric said. “There was no medication, no antibiotics at that time during the war.”
Bekric was transported out of Srebrenica to a hostel in Tuzla. Doctors told his little brother and his mother to say good-bye to him. His brother started crying and Bekric reached out and touched his face.
“Don’t cry,” Bekric told his brother. “I’m not going to die.”
Photographers took a picture of the two brothers, and the images made world news. Claire Halasz, a businesswoman with MagLite flashlights, saw the picture and decided to help Bekric and his family.
After landing in Croatia, Bekric said he could only remember waking up in a hospital bed in California. He found the silence of the hospital puzzling and unfamiliar.
“I remember waking up in Los Angles, hearing strange sounds around me with weird noises and no bombings,” Bekric recalled. “It was like going from hell to heaven.”
Immediately he asked about his family. His brother and their mother had made the trip with him to L.A. This relieved Bekric, although he said everybody had been too afraid to tell him that he would never see again.
“I accept that I will live the rest of my life blind. If something comes along, it’s great,” he said.
To repair his extensive shrapnel damage to his face, Bekric underwent 15 different surgeries, the longest one taking 18 hours. In the end, Bekric had a whole new face and a lot of challenges waiting for him.
He was in a new country with no eyesight, limited motor skills, no understanding of English or Braille and no technology training. He had to start from scratch, but he remembers thinking of the challenges ahead and not being afraid.
“It was not too scary compared to what I had already lived through,” Bekric said.
The helicopter that had transported him and his family out of Srebrenica had been shot at as they flew to Croatia, but no bombs were going off in L.A.
“Even being blind I wasn’t scared. I was glad to be alive,” he said.
After the surgeries had been completed, Bekric went to high school at Claire’s Hope in California. He learned English, Braille and adapted techniques for the blind. He became a spokesman for Red Cross, worked with Elizabeth Dole and graduated from Eckerd College with a degree in international relations.
Since then, Bekric has tried his best to take life as it comes while working to dissuade people from the notion that blind people are helpless and useless.
“A blind person wants to be treated like everyone else. A lot of sighted people see the blind as couch potatoes, but blindness is more of an inconvenience than anything else,” he said.
A month ago, Bekric opened Visual Cortex Concepts in Largo. The store makes technology services available to the blind. Bekric wanted to make that kind of information available in an area with a high percentage of people with failing eye sight.
He continues to try and repay some of the kindness that was shown to him and his family while encouraging others with sight problems to keep busy.
“I wanted to educate and provide services,” Bekric said. “I know what it means to receive help.”
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