A teenage girl tries to survive in a Utah children’s hospital after being thrown headfirst onto the pavement while car surfing.
Ava Broadhead, 15, went to a park outside Salt Lake City with friends on Wednesday night after her school’s homecoming parade was canceled due to “poor air quality.”
Now the young dance fanatic is in a coma with severe brain damage and her distraught mother is inundated with messages from people whose children have fallen victim to the same deadly craze.
“I’m sure it was, ‘Hey! We should do that, that would be fun,’ and not, ‘Oh wait, what if I fell off this car,'” said West Valley City mother Kandis George.
‘All these things in my life are going to stop, because at that moment it seems fun.’
Ava Broadhead, 15, picked out this dress to wear to her homecoming ball on Saturday
But she spent Saturday fighting for her life in an induced coma after going ‘car surfing’ with friends
The sophomore was looking forward to dancing with her drill team during the homecoming football game when events at Cypress High School on the western edge of Salt Lake City were suddenly canceled.
Ava and her friends headed to nearby Magna Regional Park, where the tragic accident occurred around 9 p.m.
“The victim was on top of that car and as the car was moving around, the victim fell off. Unfortunately, the road surface is not very forgiving and the victim hit his head,” said Sergeant Aymee Race of the Unified Police Department. Fox13.
“When people climb on top of the cars and go car surfing, it is unpredictable what injuries they can sustain once they fall.”
The most recent CDC study found that 58 people died from car surfing in the 18 years ending in 2008. The death toll continues to rise, however, exacerbated by social media.
Last May, a 16-year-old boy in Douglas County, Colorado, died after witnesses saw backseat passengers “hanging” out of the car’s windows before it crashed.
According to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, there had been six reports of incidents involving cars traveling at speeds exceeding 55 mph (88 km/h) in less than a month around the time of the death.
“That could be anything from kids hanging on the roofs of cars to kids standing in the back of cars and then driving through the car at high speeds or at high speeds,” Sergeant Race told Fox13.
‘Unfortunately, with social media, there’s an ebb and flow to these kinds of trends, but now this trend is coming back. I mean, it’s from the 80s and movies and it started 10 years ago. It was a big trend and now it’s back again.’
Mother Kandis George with daughters Elle, left, and Ava, right
Ava’s mother has taken over her daughter’s Facebook page to deliver a clear and uncompromising message to her friends
Ava’s father David Broadhead asked friends to pray for his daughter. “This weekend is extremely important for her progress,” he wrote on Facebook
On Wednesday evening, Ava’s friends called her mother to tell her about the accident, and George found her daughter in critical condition at the city’s Primary Children’s Hospital.
“She had a severe brain injury and had to undergo emergency brain surgery. It was a life or death operation,” George said.
‘She is in an induced coma, she remains stable and is resting her brain.
“The parade was cancelled due to poor air quality, so these kids wanted to get out and have a good time,” she added.
“They decided to do the trend that you see on TikTok now, I don’t think you see it anymore, but you can find it in other places too: car surfing.”
Ava’s father David Broadhead said his daughter is “in an extremely critical but stable condition.”
“This weekend is incredibly important for her progress,” he wrote on Facebook.
“I know angels guided the surgeons to do what they needed to do to relieve the pressure on her brain. I ask everyone to please pray for my beautiful daughter, will you? Please?”
TikTok has blocked searches for the term car surfing, but Ava’s mother says this has done little to reduce its popularity.
“I’ve had over 30 messages from people saying this happened to my nephew, my neighbor, and this exact same thing happened to my friend’s daughter,” she said.
“They have the same injuries, these traumatic brain injuries that keep happening. And we have to do something.
“We need to raise awareness because it’s not going to stop. These kids love it. It was in Teen Wolf and it’s been glorified by Hollywood.”
Ava’s friends at the Salt Lake Community College Dance Company sent her a get well message
Her friends on the Cypress High School drill team agreed with her
Ava has not yet responded to their messages as she fights for her life in a children’s hospital
Ava’s friends from the Salt Lake Community College Dance Company posted a get well message on their Instagram page, and George took to her daughter’s Facebook page to send an unvarnished message to her friends.
“Hi everyone, my name is Ava and this is actually my mom writing this,” she wrote. “The reason she is writing this is because I am in a coma at Primary Children’s Hospital recovering from emergency brain surgery I had late Wednesday night.
“Why did I need brain surgery then? Because I decided to do the trendy thing of ‘car surfing’ and I got thrown from the car and suffered extreme brain trauma.
‘Now I’m wearing a hospital gown, half my head is shaved (and that’s nice hair), and I’m going to sleep through homecoming weekend to let my brain heal.
‘This is going to be a long road, one that will require me to learn to walk again, tie my shoes and brush my teeth.’
A GoFundMe A page has been set up with a goal of $100,000 to help Ava with her mounting medical bills as she struggles to pull herself back from the brink.
“I can’t imagine a future without Ava being Ava,” her mother said. “It’s going to take months, if not years, to recover from this.”