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Alicia Alexander was just a girl when her horror story began. Just 14 years old, her mother sent her to a man's house to beg $40 to buy water crackers, but she nearly walked into the arms of a predator.

"My heart told me everything was wrong," Alexander told THE WEEKEND STAR. Despite her intuition, she hesitantly followed her mother's direction and headed to the man's place.

"When I got there, the person said I must enter. I was like, 'I'm not going in there.' But I remembered if I didn't, there would be problems. So I entered." The man waiting inside was naked, so Alexander ran.

"He tried to run after me, but I jumped over the fence and got away."

When she returned home, her mother demanded the $40.

"I was trembling and afraid," she said. "She sort me out properly. But I didn't go back. I chose death over going back."

What followed was a life of unimaginable pain: betrayal by family, sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy, near death, and abandonment. But through it all, she survived. Now a mother of four and a student at Distinction College, her story is a gripping testimony of endurance--and the price of freedom.

"Technically, my mother sold me," she told THE WEEKEND STAR on Thursday, on the eve of her graduation from Distinction College, where she has been chosen as the valedictorian.

Alexander said that while she escaped the man that day, he eventually came back to her house. Her parents were not there.

"He said, 'If you don't do what I want, I'll kill your mother.' I froze. I became a brick. I went somewhere else in my mind." Her cries for help were met with silence.

"It was like someone dropped me into a hole and sealed it shut."

By 15, she was pregnant, a result of her trauma.

"I didn't want the baby. When my water broke, I didn't tell anyone. I kept it a secret." At the hospital, she refused to hold the child.

"I wanted to go to school. I didn't want this. I would do anything not to be here." Alexander said she felt as if she was trapped in a web from which there was no escape. Forced to live with the baby's father, the same man who her mother sent her to beg the $40, the cycle of violence continued. She was beaten unconscious--and raped. That assault resulted in a second pregnancy at 18. During the birth of her second child, she experienced cardiac arrest and had an out-of-body experience.

"I remember seeing the doctor pumping my chest. I was like, I'm outside of my body. I saw them take the baby. I followed them. I was up watching everything. I just walked away." She described entering a place "like the prettiest place I've ever seen".

"There was a man. I didn't see his face. He said to me, 'Go home. It's not your time.'" When she woke up, her body was hooked to machines.

"My blood was basically outside on this machine. More strings on me than I could imagine," she said.

A doctor later told her, "Whatever in this world you're to achieve, go for it. Because in all my years of being a surgeon, I've never seen anyone come back to this."

Returning from the brink meant facing what she had fled.

"I got the escape ticket. Then I came back to the drama," she said. "I had to plan my ultimate escape."

She had left her first two children behind. Not out of coldness--but because she had nothing to offer them.

"I couldn't feed them. I couldn't house them. I didn't want them. I was trying to survive."

Even when she found refuge at her father's house, peace didn't come.

She found her strength through the birth of her last two children--both born with health issues. Their vulnerability gave her purpose.

"They are my saving grace. They shifted my atmosphere. They gave me power I didn't know I had."

Determined to turn her pain into purpose, she began to educate herself, attending every workshop, course, and training she could find. Eventually, she enrolled at Distinction College, where she is training to become a nurse.

"It was the nurses. The way they treated me when I was broken. When I couldn't walk. When I couldn't talk. They told me it was okay. And I thought--how can I give that back to the world?"

Today, she is healing, day by day. Her journey, once marked by abandonment, now carries hope.

"I couldn't fail again," she said.