Carmichael, CA (MPG) - On a summer night in 2012, Gemily West lost her boyfriend and the pets she had since childhood. Returning from a walk on the old Garfield Elementary School grounds, she and boyfriend Harison Long-Randall and the four dogs she called “fur kids” were hit by a drugged motorist.

Harison’s leg was severed and the lifeless bodies of Australian cattle dogs Winry, Zury, Bindie, and Evie were strewn across the road. Gemily needed 42 metal pins and a steel rod to rebuild her right limb.

“I wanted to heal to be there for Hari,” recalls Gemily. “When he died after 13 days, I felt I’d lost everything. There seemed no future.”

She could not work or walk.

Agony continued as she endured the criminal trial of driver Paul Walden (now imprisoned for life) and acrimonious estrangement from Hari’s kin.

After three years of surgeries and therapy the 26-year-old feels her life has now turned around. “I’m back on track because of my new kids,” she said. Acquired from breeders, puppies Kiry, Breezy, and Honey resemble and share some of the same blood lines of the dogs she lost.

“New puppies are a distraction,” she said smiling. “It doesn’t matter that you’re hobbling on crutches, they still need you. You have to get up and take care of them.”

With the same skill that made champions of her lost babies, Gemily trained Honey and Kiry as service companions. “Honey was made for me,” explains Gemily. “She pulls me upstairs and helps my stability, she helps my post-traumatic stress. …When I panic, she grabs my attention and makes me focus on her. I sit with her close and she calms me. My dogs fill my life with a joy I never thought I’d have again. They do my heart good; it’s like getting some of my family back.”

More comfort has come from fellow El Camino High School graduate, David Pierce. The restaurant worker reconnected with Gemily in the painful months after the accident. “We were old sweethearts who’d drifted apart,” Gemily explains. “He came by the house one day and started helping out. He mowed the lawns and helped look after the other animals I foster. We grew to love each other again.”

The couple plans to marry when the myriad of medical, financial, and legal matters that haunt Gemily’s recovery are finally behind her. In the meantime, Pierce has been adopted by the West family. He helps with sister Lilleah’s costume business: Bear Cub Creations. He is also a father figure to three boisterous fur kids.

“There is no replacing what I lost,” Gemily says. “But all these things have helped me take back some of what was taken from me.”

The Carmichael community shared in Gemily’s loss; her four-legged friends were part of community life. The oldest dog Winry was a high-jumping athlete who regularly won canine shows. With heart-melting stoicism, the champion suffered being dressed-up in Gemily’s old infant clothes at Halloween. “She saw into my soul,” recalls Gemily. “We could communicate with just our eyes. My dogs all had their individual spirits but there could never be another Winry.”

Gemily often senses Winry and the lost dogs as benevolent spirits. “I couldn’t face the Engle intersection [where the killings happened] for two years. At last, David and I took the new puppies to Garfield School where Hari and I’d been exercising the dogs that terrible night. On the playing field, a fragment of old yellow police tape blew from nowhere and wrapped itself around my feet. I felt Winry, Zurie, Bindie, and Evie’s spirits rushing past me; like they were saying, ‘Hey mom, we’re happy you’re here. We’re all having fun again.’”

Stranger things have happened. On two separate occasions since the accident, missing Australian cattle dogs mysteriously found their way to the West’s yard. Still on crutches, Gemily caught the first dog. “She was red,” she said, “and for a fleeting second I thought my precious Winry had come back to me.”

An implanted chip allowed the dog’s owners to be traced. “She’d been lost during a military family’s move two years before,” Gemily marvels. “I believe the spirits of my dogs guided her safely to where she’d get help to find her people. Her name was Tasha.

“When her owners came here to get her it was like Tasha was back from the dead. I believe my dogs helped her. They always loved being part of a family.”