Victoria Ruvolo, who was hit by turkey nearly 6 years ago, forgives teens for terrible prank

Victoria Ruvolo doesn’t even recognize herself in the photo.

Her face is swollen and bruised, nearly every bone is broken and breathing tubes run from her mouth – the result of a teenage prank gone horribly wrong.

Almost six years ago, a bunch of Long Island teenagers bought a frozen 20-pound turkey with a stolen credit card. One of them, Ryan Cushing, decided to toss it out a moving car’s window.

The rock-solid missile smashed through the front windshield of Ruvolo’s oncoming Honda in Lake Ronkokoma.

“I was one block from my house,” Ruvolo said recently. “I didn’t wake up for almost a month.”

These days, Ruvolo looks at the photo – taken after one of her many surgeries – again and again because she is determined to turn that night into something good for herself and for others.

“I’m human. Every time I see those pictures, I want to cry,” Ruvolo said. “But I think about how far I’ve come and how I can help someone else. Maybe this happened to me for a reason.”

She spent weeks in a medically induced coma after her face was completely rebuilt and then underwent months of agonizing rehabilitation.

It was a miracle she was alive, countless doctors told her. She was given the gift of new life, and she then decided to give her own gift.

At Cushing’s sentencing, she pleaded for mercy. The judge agreed, giving the teen just six months in jail followed by five years probation.

“If I hadn’t let go of that anger, I’d be consumed by this need for revenge,” said Ruvolo, now 50. “Forgiving him helps me move on.”

“I told him ‘Just do something good with your life,'” she remembered. “And then I hugged him.”

Ruvolo took her own words to heart. Though she received a settlement from a civil suit and continues to work as a manager at a collections agency, she began volunteering with the Suffolk County probation department.

Several times a month, she sits in a darkened auditorium as Robert Goldman, a Suffolk probation psychologist, gives a presentation – which includes the photo of Ruvolo’s damaged face – to teenagers and young adults in his conflict-resolution program, named TASTE.

When Ruvolo then stands to address the crowd, she is often met with gasps of surprise that the healing, both inside and out, was so complete.

“She has embraced this, she has made the message part of who she is,” said Goldman.

Cushing, now 24, who occasionally corresponds with Ruvolo, declined to comment for this story.

Despite the three titanium plates embedded in her face, Ruvolo today looks little different than she did before the accident.

But she knows she’s changed – and she thinks it’s for the better.

“I’m trying to help others, but I know for the rest of my life I’ll be known as ‘The Turkey Lady,” said Ruvolo with one of her frequent smiles.

“Could have been worse,” she said. “He could have thrown a ham. I’d be Miss Piggy!”

jlemire@nydailynews.com