By Nancy Wride
ProtectConsumerJustice.org
Mayra Fornos had big dreams, and they’d all come true by age 24. Newly married to a handsome USC student, Fornos lived across the street from the sands of Manhattan Beach, he a surfer bound for law school, she the tall and stunning fashionista. The future seemed set: He would become a lawyer; she would launch a career in apparel marketing. She was already one of three top models in Los Angeles that shaped Guess and other brands in the $2 billion jeans industry. She’d already been a Rams Cheerleader.
Then, it all cratered, with the break of a wave.
On that day in 1979, six months before graduating USC, Ralph Fornos walked into the waves with his board, and had to be carried out. Perhaps a wall of water slammed him to the ocean floor, or he hit a sandbar. He floated to the surface alive, but unmoving, a quadriplegic.
In the years that followed, her husband’s life in a wheelchair drastically changed hers. “After my husband was injured, he said ‘that’s it. We have to change the world,’ ” Fornos recalls proudly. It started with Fornos turning the pages of his law books. Immersing herself to help him with classes at University of West Los Angeles School of Law, Fornos decided to become a lawyer herself, and practiced with her husband until his death in 2002.
She views the Americans with Disabilities Act as the greatest civil rights law passed since the Civil Rights Act itself.
Today, it’s fair to say that Mayra Fornos is the only lawyer in Southern California whose entire workforce is either paraplegic or quadriplegic. She is one of the best-known Los Angeles attorneys specializing in Americans with Disabilities Act claims, and a widely respected advocate for the profoundly injured.
Working tirelessly both in and out of court, she has changed access policies, she has changed bicycle safety routes, she has changed hospital protocols. Friends say she never focuses on the money, but the cause. She has helped found two charities for the disabled.
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