Today, actor Mitch Longley is one of the stars of the NBC show Las Vegas, but he still remembers the car accident so many years before that left him with a spinal cord injury (SCI) that paralyzed him from the waist down.

At the time, he was in his senior year at Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was only a few short months away from graduation. That’s when Mitch Longley fell asleep at the wheel while taking a short but late drive home, slamming his car into a stone wall. He lacerated his liver, slashed his forehead, cracked a few ribs and broke his back.

Disability Didn’t Stop Him
Though doctors gave Mitch Longley a two percent chance of ever walking again, support from the community in which he’d grown up fueled him to believe that either way, he would continue to pursue the goal he’d had since the age of five: becoming an actor. Though his road to fame may have begun as a tall, dark, and handsome Ralph Lauren model with a disability, thanks to years of acting lessons and the unforgiving regimens of two soap operas, his acting credits now include parts on Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia.

Mitch Longley’s latest role, however, is as security expert Mitch Sassen on NBC’s Las Vegas. The drama, set in a Sin City casino, follows the lives of the surveillance team Sassen works with and focuses on their work for a group of casinos. For Longley, the role of Sassen is yet another opportunity to help inform a sometimes innocently ignorant viewing audience about how independent, mobile, employed, and even funny disabled people are.

Standing Up for the Disability Community
When speaking of Longley, publicist Patti Shanaberg said, “One would be hard-pressed to find anyone with a disability who has made a more powerfully positive impact on public perception of disability than Mitch Longley.” Longley has long been vocal about the fact that Hollywood continually underestimates the disability community from both a creative and a financial standpoint, effectively ignoring a huge segment of their audience.

In fact, Mitch Longley was the recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Harold Russell Award for his significant contributions to public awareness and understanding of people with disabilities through media. “You have to find a way to talk about it without filling people’s ears with rhetoric,” Longley says. “It’s more like you have to act as an example.”

Determined to encourage others not to allow their disability to get in the way of their career goals and relationships, Longley founded Sowoho (Spirit of the Wounded Horse, Inc.) which helps underprivileged Native Americans with physical disabilities. Sowoho projects have included working with the disability communities of the Navajo and White Mountain Apache Nations, as well as Mexico City and Bosnia-Herzegovina, among other places.

Discussing the non-profit he founded, Mitch Longley says, “What we do to a wounded horse is shoot it. But if it just had a brace or something to prop it up, it could be productive and functional again. The horse’s intellect is the same, and its spirit. Its mind is fully aware of what its abilities were before the injury, and it is fully aware of what it can still be.”

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