Thousands of People Moved to Help Oak Forest Family Win Car

Ramon Ferralez wished his wife a Merry Christmas a day early, and joked that he’d gotten her a car. What would she get him, he chided.

“Socks,” Dawn Ferralez kidded, with tears still in her eyes. Ferralez had just been handed the keys to the brand new Chevrolet Sonic her family won in an online contest through Homewood Chevrolet.

“The biggest gift ever,” Dawn said.

The Ferralez family garnered thousands of votes in the Homewood Chevy Cares contest, which called for families in need to submit an entry stating how a free car would change their lives. For Dawn and Ramon Ferralez, whose daughter Joselyn recently spent months battling Stage 2 aggressive non-Hodgkins Burkitt’s lymphoma, that meant a reliable tool to help them provide for their family. The family had been in danger of losing their car due to non-payment, as the parents had taken time off of work to be with Joselyn during treatment. She has since entered remission.

“It’s perfect,” Dawn said. “It means everything.”

Dawn commutes to Chicago for work, as well as shuttling Joselyn for treatments and meeting the schedule of their 15-year-old daughter Taylor. The pair’s youngest daughter Liv hugged the car when she saw it and the big, red bow on it, and seemed to take special pride in honking the horn—a lot.

“It’s taken such a weight off,” Dawn said. ”Without it, I didn’t know how I was going to get to work. It’s security, secures the fact that I can continue to provide for the kids.”

The contest drew an unexpected amount of votes, with more than 30,000 cast in just 10 days. The site saw so much traffic, in fact, that it crashed several times, said designer Bill Anderson. In the final day, the site accrued more than 20,000 visits, and throughout the voting period, votes came in at a rate of two per minute.

“It put a lot of pressure on our server,” Anderson said, chuckling. “It’s a phenomenon of social media.”

The Ferralez family felt the love from their community, stretching across Illinois and even internationally. But it’s the votes from home that they cherish the most.

“Thank you, it’s been a blessing,” Dawn said to her community. “It shows how much they love us. It shows how much they care about us.

“We feel the love from everybody.”