Before and after: A ‘non life-threatening’ accident can lead to a lifetime of agony
Melissa Cacciapaglia and her two children, Matthew, 12, and Hannah, 13, were involved in a head on collision on January 6, two thousand nine on Route one hundred six in Plainville. Albeit the cars involved were totaled the Cacciapaglia’s sustained no major injuries at the time of the crash. Melissa is holding a news photo of the accident. The car they were in is the Honda minivan on the ramp truck in the photo. They live in Franklin.
Brian and Elyse Arruda of Attleboro with a memorial case containing the ashes of their unborn son, Grayson Anthony, who was killed in a car crash in 2012.
Oronde Hale of Norton still bear scars from his two thousand seven motorcycle accident.
Oronde Hale still bear scars from his motorcycle accident.
Ben Hatch at the scene of two thousand eight car accident on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro in which he was earnestly injured. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconscious for several days following the accident. He still suffers from ear issues.
Ben Hatch stands next to a utlitly pole down the street from his house on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro that was most likely substituted when the car he was a passenger in hit the pole in 2008. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconcious for several days following the accident of which he has no recollection of.
The Arrudas describe their lives in two acts: Their family before the two thousand twelve accident that took the life of their unborn son, and their family after.
In a split-second — a heartbeat truly — a car crash on a late spring night switched their lives forever, leaving them to figure out what it all meant and attempt their best to carry on.
For fatal victims of car accidents, the effects are obviously instant; there is no after.
The Association for Safe International Road Travel says approximately 37,000 people die in car accidents across the United States each year.
But for those who sustain — for the extra Two.Four million who are left with injuries and disabilities, the so-called “lucky ones” — the consequences of car accidents can be continually devastating, physically, mentally and financially.
When police officers report on car accidents, they list victims with injuries in two categories: Life menacing, or not.
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia of Franklin still has a newspaper from the day of her crash in Plainville, where her injuries were listed as “non-life menacing.” But there has been no chronicle of her life since, a life, like so many others who have gone through similar practices, of anguish, worry and fright.
The Sun Chronicle tracked down several area residents of accidents long past to see how these single moments shaped their futures.
Here are their stories.
Bryan and Elyse Arruda
There is a tree in Roger Williams Memorial Park in Providence that bears Grayson Arruda’s name. One that grows for the little boy who could not.
At twenty five 1/Two weeks pregnant in May 2012, the Arrudas were ready to embark construction on their soon-to-be nursery for their soon-to-be very first son when a sleepy driver threw that plan off track.
Brian and Elyse, both now 33, were on their way home from a late-night fundraiser in Taunton when a car came around a curve off Route one hundred twenty three in Norton and hit them head on, headlights dazzling.
“One minute we were talking about painting the nursery the next day and going to check out furniture,” Elyse Arruda said. “The next minute we heard someone yell, ‘Sorry I fell asleep.’”
There became the split of before and after.
Very first responders sped the duo to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where Elyse spent a week in a medically-induced coma as she recovered from half a dozen surgeries that ripped her insides apart, taking her spleen and a duo feet of intestines. For Brian, the accident left outward scars: cracked bones in his arm that required surgery, plates and screws.
And for Grayson, the accident proved fatal. He was delivered by an emergency c-section and lived for twelve minutes, Elyse said. Trauma from the accident proved too much for his lil’ and fragile figure.
“The next few weeks were hazy,” Elyse said. “I reminisce waking up and not being OK and having that revelation of, where’s my baby? Being pregnant with Grayson makes the accident define life before and life after.”
For Brian, it wasn’t so plain.
“A lot of this story leaves me in the waiting room,” he said. “At very first I refused to go into surgery because I didn’t know what was going on with her and Grayson. But I recall — and I’ll never leave behind their faces — there were three surgeons who came into the room and told me my son passed away. When I asked about Elyse, all they could say was, ‘We’re doing all we can for her.’ That’s the most tense part for me. Once she was put under coma it was brutal, holding her mitt when she didn’t know I was there.”
The accident left them about a month in the hospital, with six months of physical therapy to go after.
Their finances were taken care of by family and friends. Funeral services were donated by a Providence funeral home. Their employers, graciously Brian says, were lenient and understanding.
But the emotional scars were irreversible. Elyse had gotten her very first Mother’s Day just before the accident. Grayson was taken before Brian’s turn on Father’s Day came around. Two friends were pregnant around the same time, and watching their kids grow up, the Arrudas can’t help but think of the milestones Grayson will miss.
It took awhile to drive again, and still today the duo avoids driving at night.
But the accident also had lasting physical impacts.
The duo needed IVF to get pregnant again in 2014.
Then, at twenty three weeks, their 2nd son Cameron was born. Early. At one pound, five ounces.
The scar tissue left behind from the accident couldn’t bear the stress of a pregnancy.
“I thought, we already lost a child,” Elyse said. “Every medical person who walked in said at twenty three weeks, he wouldn’t be viable. There was a strong possibility he’s not going to make it.”
But he did, albeit it once again put Elyse’s life in danger.
“There was that PTSD factor going in and out of surgery that, what should have been a routine c-section was more surgery and more intestines taken,” Brian said. “Every surgery was more complicated and every surgery took longer than they said it would.”
Cameron survived, but the Arrudas were left with the understanding that they won’t be able to have anymore children.
“He doesn’t substitute Grayson,” Brian said. “And now there won’t be another after Cameron. But we’re fortunate to have him.”
Cameron, now Three, knows a little bit about his older brother. He knows it’s “Grayson’s tree” that they visit and he knows Grayson’s ashes are at home on a shelf. But he doesn’t yet understand that Grayson is his older brother.
That’s a conversation for someday, the Arrudas say.
For now, they’re focused on providing him the life his brother was robbed.
“We treat things differently,” Elyse said. “Everything is about attempting to make memories. The dishes can wait. Work can wait.”
“You’re not assured to be here,” Brian said. “You don’t let the little things bother you. That accident was able to put into perspective our entire lives.
“I’ve driven tired, I’m guilty of that. But now I couldn’t think of it. You don’t realize the danger you’re putting everyone in. It’s rough for people to understand that five years later it still affects us. We still talk about what could be, should be.”
“If it were just physical, we’d be back where we were. It’d be fine,” Elyse added. “But the loss of Grayson — for me that makes it before and after.”
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, Plainville
There’s an intersection in Plainville that Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, of Franklin attempts to avoid.
The intersection, off of Route one hundred six and George Street and known as a trouble spot in the area, found Cacciapaglia and her two children trapped in a three-car accident about eight years ago as they drove home from the Plainville Library.
“There was no time to embrace the influence,” Cacciapaglia said. “Everything just happened so quick.”
The airbags deployed and crushed Cacciapaglia’s chest, leaving black and blue bruising all over.
But there was no time for her to think about her anguish. All she thought was: “Are my kids OK?” Adrenaline soon took over.
The kids, four and five at the time, cried in shock and Cacciapaglia instantly hopped out of the car, rushing to their aid.
Albeit none of their injuries were “life menacing,” Cacciapaglia said that the long-term, emotional and physical effects would stay for years to come.
Soon after the crash, Cacciapaglia met with a lawyer to make sure she was reimbursed from insurance companies to cover the cost of her totaled car.
“Fortunately we lodged,” she said. “But the process was tiring, it called for a lot of back-and-forth phone calls inbetween my attorney, me and the insurance companies.”
But the influence of the accident didn’t stop there.
About a year after the accident, Cacciapaglia woke up one morning with a terrible anguish in her back — one that leisurely intensified from the day of the crash, leaving her incapable to budge.
She was prescribed to see a chiropractor, but eventually the agony manifested itself into something she could no longer deal with, and she was diagnosed with a bulbous disk.
“It made no sense,” she said. “At this time in my life I was in the best form I’ve ever been and there was nothing that happened besides the accident that I can think of which would have caused it.”
Several epidurals were unsuccessful, and Cacciapaglia would eventually need surgery.
“It was undoubtedly an emotional roller coaster for me,” she said.
Eight years have passed since the day of the accident, but the crash is a continuous reminder to Cacciapaglia of how quickly life can switch.
Last month Cacciapaglia and her family moved from Plainville to Franklin and as she rummaged through old boxes, she came across the newspaper article published by The Sun Chronicle on Jan. 7, 2009.
Memories of the crash invaded her mind.
“It’s a day I will never leave behind,” she said.
Oronde Hale, 37, Norton
Oronde Hale marks his car accidents by his children.
An adequate stir, he says, because fatherhood kept him alive through each one.
His very first, in 2001, was just months before his very first daughter was born.
Hale, 21, was out celebrating his friend’s upcoming bday in Raynham when his car was hit by a driver haul racing on Interstate 495.
Their car was t-boned at one hundred ten mph.
“It killed my friends in the front seats instantly,” Hale said. “But I was just left there. I recall witnessing them hunched over. And then I don’t recall anything until the guys were cutting me out with the jaws of life. I recall screaming, ‘Don’t cut my gam off.’”
Hale was airlifted to Boston Medical Center where he spent three months recovering from injuries to his back, hip, femur and forearm.
“I don’t think I bounced back fully for ten years,” Hale, now 37, said.
But worse were the emotional scars.
Hale lost two childhood friends from the accident, Sean Tessier and Hossam Abdullah, all three from Norton.
“I visit their graves a lot,” he said, “and I do a lot of thinking about what they would be doing with their lives, what they might’ve been like as fathers.”
It was his own forthcoming child that he believes spared his life that night.
“Something tells me I was supposed to live through that car accident to be a father,” he said.
But, “three kids later,” Hale remarks, he found himself in similar straits.
In 2007, he was driving his motorcycle on Mechanic Street in Foxboro when a woman ran through a stop sign, colliding with Hale and sending him through her back window.
His third child was born six days before the accident.
Hale was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where his spleen and appendix were eliminated and he underwent reconstructive surgery on his left arm.
Both accidents left him with an sore hip and mobility issues in his palms.
But he was also left with a more positive appreciation for life.
“I wouldn’t say I feel fortunate, but I’m glad to be alive,” he said. “I’m glad to have my health, and to not need someone to take care of me on a regular basis.”
The accidents refocused his life to his family, which has grown to five kids: Three chicks, two boys.
“I think it slowed me down. I looked at the big scheme of things. Before this I was a single dude living a single life. After the fact I thought more about my children and what would happen if I wasn’t around. It brought me back to reality,” he said.
Ben Hatch, 30, Attleboro
Attleboro resident Ben Hatch, 30, doesn’t reminisce much about the serious car accident he was in almost nine years ago — but one thing he will always reminisce is the breathtaking gratitude he felt toward the very first responders and doctors who saved his life.
In the early hours of Dec. 14, 2008, police responded to a report at two hundred eighty eight Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro of a car striking a tree.
Very first responders found Hatch, twenty one at the time, unconscious with severe head injuries, trapped on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Snow-slushed roads and too many drinks proved a toxic combination that night.
Hatch’s friend at the time was driving under the influence of alcohol when he took a acute turn on the slushy road, causing the car to spiral out of control and strike a tree.
The accident occurred right outside the home Hatch grew up in, and his parents were among the very first people at the scene.
“They were devastated. I was totally unconscious and there was nothing they could do,” Hatch said.
Hatch said very first responders later told him they feared he would not make it due to a gasping sound he made.
“I guess it was a very scary sound,” he said.
Hatch was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital and admitted into the neurosurgical intensive care unit. He was treated by doctors to attempt and heal his subdural hematoma — a head injury strong enough to burst blood vessels in the brain.
But he did not wake up until a few days later.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Hatch said. “I woke up to family and friends surrounding me telling me I was going to be OK, but I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
His injury was treatable without surgery and required only a week’s worth of doctors closely monitoring him before he was released.
“The very first thing I did when I got home was look at myself in the mirror,” Hatch said. “Luckily, all I had was a scar, but what freaked me out the most was the fact that I had a beard.”
“I thanked God that those were the only visible damages.”
Today, Hatch is still living out the devastating effects of his accident.
The accident caused Hatch to have some nerve harm, making it difficult to hear in his right ear.
He now suffers with tinnitus — which causes a ringing sound in the ears. “It’s annoying,” he said, “but I’m so fortunate that this is the only thing I have to deal with — it could’ve been so much worse.”
Before and after: A non life-threatening accident can lead to a lifetime of agony, Local News
Before and after: A ‘non life-threatening’ accident can lead to a lifetime of agony
Melissa Cacciapaglia and her two children, Matthew, 12, and Hannah, 13, were involved in a head on collision on January 6, two thousand nine on Route one hundred six in Plainville. Albeit the cars involved were totaled the Cacciapaglia’s sustained no major injuries at the time of the crash. Melissa is holding a news photo of the accident. The car they were in is the Honda minivan on the ramp truck in the photo. They live in Franklin.
Brian and Elyse Arruda of Attleboro with a memorial case containing the ashes of their unborn son, Grayson Anthony, who was killed in a car crash in 2012.
Oronde Hale of Norton still bear scars from his two thousand seven motorcycle accident.
Oronde Hale still bear scars from his motorcycle accident.
Ben Hatch at the scene of two thousand eight car accident on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro in which he was earnestly injured. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconscious for several days following the accident. He still suffers from ear issues.
Ben Hatch stands next to a utlitly pole down the street from his house on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro that was most likely substituted when the car he was a passenger in hit the pole in 2008. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconcious for several days following the accident of which he has no recollection of.
The Arrudas describe their lives in two acts: Their family before the two thousand twelve accident that took the life of their unborn son, and their family after.
In a split-second — a heartbeat truly — a car crash on a late spring night switched their lives forever, leaving them to figure out what it all meant and attempt their best to carry on.
For fatal victims of car accidents, the effects are obviously instant; there is no after.
The Association for Safe International Road Travel says approximately 37,000 people die in car accidents across the United States each year.
But for those who get through — for the extra Two.Four million who are left with injuries and disabilities, the so-called “lucky ones” — the consequences of car accidents can be continuously devastating, physically, mentally and financially.
When police officers report on car accidents, they list victims with injuries in two categories: Life menacing, or not.
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia of Franklin still has a newspaper from the day of her crash in Plainville, where her injuries were listed as “non-life menacing.” But there has been no chronicle of her life since, a life, like so many others who have gone through similar practices, of agony, worry and fright.
The Sun Chronicle tracked down several area residents of accidents long past to see how these single moments shaped their futures.
Here are their stories.
Bryan and Elyse Arruda
There is a tree in Roger Williams Memorial Park in Providence that bears Grayson Arruda’s name. One that grows for the little boy who could not.
At twenty five 1/Two weeks pregnant in May 2012, the Arrudas were ready to commence construction on their soon-to-be nursery for their soon-to-be very first son when a sleepy driver threw that plan off track.
Brian and Elyse, both now 33, were on their way home from a late-night fundraiser in Taunton when a car came around a curve off Route one hundred twenty three in Norton and hit them head on, headlights dazzling.
“One minute we were talking about painting the nursery the next day and going to check out furniture,” Elyse Arruda said. “The next minute we heard someone yell, ‘Sorry I fell asleep.’”
There became the split of before and after.
Very first responders sped the duo to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where Elyse spent a week in a medically-induced coma as she recovered from half a dozen surgeries that ripped her insides apart, taking her spleen and a duo feet of intestines. For Brian, the accident left outward scars: violated bones in his arm that required surgery, plates and screws.
And for Grayson, the accident proved fatal. He was delivered by an emergency c-section and lived for twelve minutes, Elyse said. Trauma from the accident proved too much for his lil’ and fragile bod.
“The next few weeks were hazy,” Elyse said. “I recall waking up and not being OK and having that revelation of, where’s my baby? Being pregnant with Grayson makes the accident define life before and life after.”
For Brian, it wasn’t so ordinary.
“A lot of this story leaves me in the waiting room,” he said. “At very first I refused to go into surgery because I didn’t know what was going on with her and Grayson. But I recall — and I’ll never leave behind their faces — there were three surgeons who came into the room and told me my son passed away. When I asked about Elyse, all they could say was, ‘We’re doing all we can for her.’ That’s the most tense part for me. Once she was put under coma it was brutal, holding her palm when she didn’t know I was there.”
The accident left them about a month in the hospital, with six months of physical therapy to go after.
Their finances were taken care of by family and friends. Funeral services were donated by a Providence funeral home. Their employers, graciously Brian says, were lenient and understanding.
But the emotional scars were irreversible. Elyse had gotten her very first Mother’s Day just before the accident. Grayson was taken before Brian’s turn on Father’s Day came around. Two friends were pregnant around the same time, and watching their kids grow up, the Arrudas can’t help but think of the milestones Grayson will miss.
It took awhile to drive again, and still today the duo avoids driving at night.
But the accident also had lasting physical impacts.
The duo needed IVF to get pregnant again in 2014.
Then, at twenty three weeks, their 2nd son Cameron was born. Early. At one pound, five ounces.
The scar tissue left behind from the accident couldn’t bear the stress of a pregnancy.
“I thought, we already lost a child,” Elyse said. “Every medical person who walked in said at twenty three weeks, he wouldn’t be viable. There was a strong possibility he’s not going to make it.”
But he did, albeit it once again put Elyse’s life in danger.
“There was that PTSD factor going in and out of surgery that, what should have been a routine c-section was more surgery and more intestines taken,” Brian said. “Every surgery was more complicated and every surgery took longer than they said it would.”
Cameron survived, but the Arrudas were left with the understanding that they won’t be able to have anymore children.
“He doesn’t substitute Grayson,” Brian said. “And now there won’t be another after Cameron. But we’re fortunate to have him.”
Cameron, now Trio, knows a little bit about his older brother. He knows it’s “Grayson’s tree” that they visit and he knows Grayson’s ashes are at home on a shelf. But he doesn’t yet understand that Grayson is his older brother.
That’s a conversation for someday, the Arrudas say.
For now, they’re focused on providing him the life his brother was robbed.
“We treat things differently,” Elyse said. “Everything is about attempting to make memories. The dishes can wait. Work can wait.”
“You’re not ensured to be here,” Brian said. “You don’t let the little things bother you. That accident was able to put into perspective our entire lives.
“I’ve driven tired, I’m guilty of that. But now I couldn’t think of it. You don’t realize the danger you’re putting everyone in. It’s raunchy for people to understand that five years later it still affects us. We still talk about what could be, should be.”
“If it were just physical, we’d be back where we were. It’d be fine,” Elyse added. “But the loss of Grayson — for me that makes it before and after.”
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, Plainville
There’s an intersection in Plainville that Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, of Franklin attempts to avoid.
The intersection, off of Route one hundred six and George Street and known as a trouble spot in the area, found Cacciapaglia and her two children trapped in a three-car accident about eight years ago as they drove home from the Plainville Library.
“There was no time to embrace the influence,” Cacciapaglia said. “Everything just happened so quick.”
The airbags deployed and crushed Cacciapaglia’s chest, leaving black and blue bruising all over.
But there was no time for her to think about her agony. All she thought was: “Are my kids OK?” Adrenaline soon took over.
The kids, four and five at the time, cried in shock and Cacciapaglia instantaneously hopped out of the car, rushing to their aid.
Albeit none of their injuries were “life menacing,” Cacciapaglia said that the long-term, emotional and physical effects would stay for years to come.
Soon after the crash, Cacciapaglia met with a lawyer to make sure she was reimbursed from insurance companies to cover the cost of her totaled car.
“Fortunately we lodged,” she said. “But the process was tiring, it called for a lot of back-and-forth phone calls inbetween my attorney, me and the insurance companies.”
But the influence of the accident didn’t stop there.
About a year after the accident, Cacciapaglia woke up one morning with a terrible anguish in her back — one that leisurely intensified from the day of the crash, leaving her incapable to stir.
She was prescribed to see a chiropractor, but eventually the agony manifested itself into something she could no longer deal with, and she was diagnosed with a bulbous disk.
“It made no sense,” she said. “At this time in my life I was in the best form I’ve ever been and there was nothing that happened besides the accident that I can think of which would have caused it.”
Several epidurals were unsuccessful, and Cacciapaglia would eventually need surgery.
“It was certainly an emotional roller coaster for me,” she said.
Eight years have passed since the day of the accident, but the crash is a continuous reminder to Cacciapaglia of how quickly life can switch.
Last month Cacciapaglia and her family moved from Plainville to Franklin and as she rummaged through old boxes, she came across the newspaper article published by The Sun Chronicle on Jan. 7, 2009.
Memories of the crash invaded her mind.
“It’s a day I will never leave behind,” she said.
Oronde Hale, 37, Norton
Oronde Hale marks his car accidents by his children.
An adequate stir, he says, because fatherhood kept him alive through each one.
His very first, in 2001, was just months before his very first daughter was born.
Hale, 21, was out celebrating his friend’s upcoming bday in Raynham when his car was hit by a driver haul racing on Interstate 495.
Their car was t-boned at one hundred ten mph.
“It killed my friends in the front seats instantly,” Hale said. “But I was just left there. I reminisce eyeing them hunched over. And then I don’t reminisce anything until the guys were cutting me out with the jaws of life. I reminisce screaming, ‘Don’t cut my gam off.’”
Hale was airlifted to Boston Medical Center where he spent three months recovering from injuries to his back, hip, femur and forearm.
“I don’t think I bounced back fully for ten years,” Hale, now 37, said.
But worse were the emotional scars.
Hale lost two childhood friends from the accident, Sean Tessier and Hossam Abdullah, all three from Norton.
“I visit their graves a lot,” he said, “and I do a lot of thinking about what they would be doing with their lives, what they might’ve been like as fathers.”
It was his own emerging child that he believes spared his life that night.
“Something tells me I was supposed to live through that car accident to be a father,” he said.
But, “three kids later,” Hale remarks, he found himself in similar straits.
In 2007, he was driving his motorcycle on Mechanic Street in Foxboro when a woman ran through a stop sign, colliding with Hale and sending him through her back window.
His third child was born six days before the accident.
Hale was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where his spleen and appendix were liquidated and he underwent reconstructive surgery on his left arm.
Both accidents left him with an sore hip and mobility issues in his arms.
But he was also left with a more positive appreciation for life.
“I wouldn’t say I feel fortunate, but I’m glad to be alive,” he said. “I’m glad to have my health, and to not need someone to take care of me on a regular basis.”
The accidents refocused his life to his family, which has grown to five kids: Three chicks, two boys.
“I think it slowed me down. I looked at the big scheme of things. Before this I was a single fellow living a single life. After the fact I thought more about my children and what would happen if I wasn’t around. It brought me back to reality,” he said.
Ben Hatch, 30, Attleboro
Attleboro resident Ben Hatch, 30, doesn’t reminisce much about the serious car accident he was in almost nine years ago — but one thing he will always reminisce is the breathtaking gratitude he felt toward the very first responders and doctors who saved his life.
In the early hours of Dec. 14, 2008, police responded to a report at two hundred eighty eight Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro of a car striking a tree.
Very first responders found Hatch, twenty one at the time, unconscious with severe head injuries, trapped on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Snow-slushed roads and too many drinks proved a toxic combination that night.
Hatch’s friend at the time was driving under the influence of alcohol when he took a acute turn on the slushy road, causing the car to spiral out of control and strike a tree.
The accident occurred right outside the home Hatch grew up in, and his parents were among the very first people at the scene.
“They were devastated. I was entirely unconscious and there was nothing they could do,” Hatch said.
Hatch said very first responders later told him they feared he would not make it due to a gasping sound he made.
“I guess it was a very scary sound,” he said.
Hatch was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital and admitted into the neurosurgical intensive care unit. He was treated by doctors to attempt and heal his subdural hematoma — a head injury strong enough to burst blood vessels in the brain.
But he did not wake up until a few days later.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Hatch said. “I woke up to family and friends surrounding me telling me I was going to be OK, but I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
His injury was treatable without surgery and required only a week’s worth of doctors closely monitoring him before he was released.
“The very first thing I did when I got home was look at myself in the mirror,” Hatch said. “Luckily, all I had was a scar, but what freaked me out the most was the fact that I had a beard.”
“I thanked God that those were the only visible damages.”
Today, Hatch is still living out the devastating effects of his accident.
The accident caused Hatch to have some nerve harm, making it difficult to hear in his right ear.
He now suffers with tinnitus — which causes a ringing sound in the ears. “It’s annoying,” he said, “but I’m so fortunate that this is the only thing I have to deal with — it could’ve been so much worse.”
Before and after: A non life-threatening accident can lead to a lifetime of agony, Local News
Before and after: A ‘non life-threatening’ accident can lead to a lifetime of agony
Melissa Cacciapaglia and her two children, Matthew, 12, and Hannah, 13, were involved in a head on collision on January 6, two thousand nine on Route one hundred six in Plainville. Albeit the cars involved were totaled the Cacciapaglia’s sustained no major injuries at the time of the crash. Melissa is holding a news photo of the accident. The car they were in is the Honda minivan on the ramp truck in the photo. They live in Franklin.
Brian and Elyse Arruda of Attleboro with a memorial case containing the ashes of their unborn son, Grayson Anthony, who was killed in a car crash in 2012.
Oronde Hale of Norton still bear scars from his two thousand seven motorcycle accident.
Oronde Hale still bear scars from his motorcycle accident.
Ben Hatch at the scene of two thousand eight car accident on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro in which he was earnestly injured. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconscious for several days following the accident. He still suffers from ear issues.
Ben Hatch stands next to a utlitly pole down the street from his house on Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro that was most likely substituted when the car he was a passenger in hit the pole in 2008. Hatch suffered facial injuries and was unconcious for several days following the accident of which he has no recollection of.
The Arrudas describe their lives in two acts: Their family before the two thousand twelve accident that took the life of their unborn son, and their family after.
In a split-second — a heartbeat indeed — a car crash on a late spring night switched their lives forever, leaving them to figure out what it all meant and attempt their best to carry on.
For fatal victims of car accidents, the effects are obviously instant; there is no after.
The Association for Safe International Road Travel says approximately 37,000 people die in car accidents across the United States each year.
But for those who sustain — for the extra Two.Four million who are left with injuries and disabilities, the so-called “lucky ones” — the consequences of car accidents can be continuously devastating, physically, mentally and financially.
When police officers report on car accidents, they list victims with injuries in two categories: Life menacing, or not.
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia of Franklin still has a newspaper from the day of her crash in Plainville, where her injuries were listed as “non-life menacing.” But there has been no chronicle of her life since, a life, like so many others who have gone through similar practices, of agony, worry and fright.
The Sun Chronicle tracked down several area residents of accidents long past to see how these single moments shaped their futures.
Here are their stories.
Bryan and Elyse Arruda
There is a tree in Roger Williams Memorial Park in Providence that bears Grayson Arruda’s name. One that grows for the little boy who could not.
At twenty five 1/Two weeks pregnant in May 2012, the Arrudas were ready to begin construction on their soon-to-be nursery for their soon-to-be very first son when a sleepy driver threw that plan off track.
Brian and Elyse, both now 33, were on their way home from a late-night fundraiser in Taunton when a car came around a curve off Route one hundred twenty three in Norton and hit them head on, headlights dazzling.
“One minute we were talking about painting the nursery the next day and going to check out furniture,” Elyse Arruda said. “The next minute we heard someone yell, ‘Sorry I fell asleep.’”
There became the split of before and after.
Very first responders sped the duo to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where Elyse spent a week in a medically-induced coma as she recovered from half a dozen surgeries that ripped her insides apart, taking her spleen and a duo feet of intestines. For Brian, the accident left outward scars: violated bones in his arm that required surgery, plates and screws.
And for Grayson, the accident proved fatal. He was delivered by an emergency c-section and lived for twelve minutes, Elyse said. Trauma from the accident proved too much for his lil’ and fragile assets.
“The next few weeks were hazy,” Elyse said. “I recall waking up and not being OK and having that revelation of, where’s my baby? Being pregnant with Grayson makes the accident define life before and life after.”
For Brian, it wasn’t so elementary.
“A lot of this story leaves me in the waiting room,” he said. “At very first I refused to go into surgery because I didn’t know what was going on with her and Grayson. But I recall — and I’ll never leave behind their faces — there were three surgeons who came into the room and told me my son passed away. When I asked about Elyse, all they could say was, ‘We’re doing all we can for her.’ That’s the most tense part for me. Once she was put under coma it was brutal, holding her arm when she didn’t know I was there.”
The accident left them about a month in the hospital, with six months of physical therapy to go after.
Their finances were taken care of by family and friends. Funeral services were donated by a Providence funeral home. Their employers, graciously Brian says, were lenient and understanding.
But the emotional scars were irreversible. Elyse had gotten her very first Mother’s Day just before the accident. Grayson was taken before Brian’s turn on Father’s Day came around. Two friends were pregnant around the same time, and watching their kids grow up, the Arrudas can’t help but think of the milestones Grayson will miss.
It took awhile to drive again, and still today the duo avoids driving at night.
But the accident also had lasting physical impacts.
The duo needed IVF to get pregnant again in 2014.
Then, at twenty three weeks, their 2nd son Cameron was born. Early. At one pound, five ounces.
The scar tissue left behind from the accident couldn’t bear the stress of a pregnancy.
“I thought, we already lost a child,” Elyse said. “Every medical person who walked in said at twenty three weeks, he wouldn’t be viable. There was a strong possibility he’s not going to make it.”
But he did, albeit it once again put Elyse’s life in danger.
“There was that PTSD factor going in and out of surgery that, what should have been a routine c-section was more surgery and more intestines taken,” Brian said. “Every surgery was more complicated and every surgery took longer than they said it would.”
Cameron survived, but the Arrudas were left with the understanding that they won’t be able to have anymore children.
“He doesn’t substitute Grayson,” Brian said. “And now there won’t be another after Cameron. But we’re fortunate to have him.”
Cameron, now Trio, knows a little bit about his older brother. He knows it’s “Grayson’s tree” that they visit and he knows Grayson’s ashes are at home on a shelf. But he doesn’t yet understand that Grayson is his older brother.
That’s a conversation for someday, the Arrudas say.
For now, they’re focused on providing him the life his brother was robbed.
“We treat things differently,” Elyse said. “Everything is about attempting to make memories. The dishes can wait. Work can wait.”
“You’re not ensured to be here,” Brian said. “You don’t let the little things bother you. That accident was able to put into perspective our entire lives.
“I’ve driven tired, I’m guilty of that. But now I couldn’t think of it. You don’t realize the danger you’re putting everyone in. It’s harsh for people to understand that five years later it still affects us. We still talk about what could be, should be.”
“If it were just physical, we’d be back where we were. It’d be fine,” Elyse added. “But the loss of Grayson — for me that makes it before and after.”
Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, Plainville
There’s an intersection in Plainville that Melissa Celata Cacciapaglia, 44, of Franklin attempts to avoid.
The intersection, off of Route one hundred six and George Street and known as a trouble spot in the area, found Cacciapaglia and her two children trapped in a three-car accident about eight years ago as they drove home from the Plainville Library.
“There was no time to embrace the influence,” Cacciapaglia said. “Everything just happened so quick.”
The airbags deployed and crushed Cacciapaglia’s chest, leaving black and blue bruising all over.
But there was no time for her to think about her agony. All she thought was: “Are my kids OK?” Adrenaline soon took over.
The kids, four and five at the time, cried in shock and Cacciapaglia instantly hopped out of the car, rushing to their aid.
Albeit none of their injuries were “life menacing,” Cacciapaglia said that the long-term, emotional and physical effects would remain for years to come.
Soon after the crash, Cacciapaglia met with a lawyer to make sure she was reimbursed from insurance companies to cover the cost of her totaled car.
“Fortunately we lodged,” she said. “But the process was tiring, it called for a lot of back-and-forth phone calls inbetween my attorney, me and the insurance companies.”
But the influence of the accident didn’t stop there.
About a year after the accident, Cacciapaglia woke up one morning with a terrible anguish in her back — one that leisurely intensified from the day of the crash, leaving her incapable to stir.
She was prescribed to see a chiropractor, but eventually the agony manifested itself into something she could no longer deal with, and she was diagnosed with a bulbous disk.
“It made no sense,” she said. “At this time in my life I was in the best form I’ve ever been and there was nothing that happened besides the accident that I can think of which would have caused it.”
Several epidurals were unsuccessful, and Cacciapaglia would eventually need surgery.
“It was certainly an emotional roller coaster for me,” she said.
Eight years have passed since the day of the accident, but the crash is a continuous reminder to Cacciapaglia of how quickly life can switch.
Last month Cacciapaglia and her family moved from Plainville to Franklin and as she rummaged through old boxes, she came across the newspaper article published by The Sun Chronicle on Jan. 7, 2009.
Memories of the crash invaded her mind.
“It’s a day I will never leave behind,” she said.
Oronde Hale, 37, Norton
Oronde Hale marks his car accidents by his children.
An adequate budge, he says, because fatherhood kept him alive through each one.
His very first, in 2001, was just months before his very first daughter was born.
Hale, 21, was out celebrating his friend’s upcoming bday in Raynham when his car was hit by a driver haul racing on Interstate 495.
Their car was t-boned at one hundred ten mph.
“It killed my friends in the front seats instantly,” Hale said. “But I was just left there. I recall observing them hunched over. And then I don’t recall anything until the guys were cutting me out with the jaws of life. I recall screaming, ‘Don’t cut my gam off.’”
Hale was airlifted to Boston Medical Center where he spent three months recovering from injuries to his back, hip, femur and forearm.
“I don’t think I bounced back fully for ten years,” Hale, now 37, said.
But worse were the emotional scars.
Hale lost two childhood friends from the accident, Sean Tessier and Hossam Abdullah, all three from Norton.
“I visit their graves a lot,” he said, “and I do a lot of thinking about what they would be doing with their lives, what they might’ve been like as fathers.”
It was his own forthcoming child that he believes spared his life that night.
“Something tells me I was supposed to live through that car accident to be a father,” he said.
But, “three kids later,” Hale remarks, he found himself in similar straits.
In 2007, he was driving his motorcycle on Mechanic Street in Foxboro when a woman ran through a stop sign, colliding with Hale and sending him through her back window.
His third child was born six days before the accident.
Hale was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where his spleen and appendix were liquidated and he underwent reconstructive surgery on his left arm.
Both accidents left him with an sore hip and mobility issues in his forearms.
But he was also left with a more positive appreciation for life.
“I wouldn’t say I feel fortunate, but I’m glad to be alive,” he said. “I’m glad to have my health, and to not need someone to take care of me on a regular basis.”
The accidents refocused his life to his family, which has grown to five kids: Three women, two boys.
“I think it slowed me down. I looked at the big scheme of things. Before this I was a single boy living a single life. After the fact I thought more about my children and what would happen if I wasn’t around. It brought me back to reality,” he said.
Ben Hatch, 30, Attleboro
Attleboro resident Ben Hatch, 30, doesn’t reminisce much about the serious car accident he was in almost nine years ago — but one thing he will always reminisce is the terrific gratitude he felt toward the very first responders and doctors who saved his life.
In the early hours of Dec. 14, 2008, police responded to a report at two hundred eighty eight Hoppin Hill Road in North Attleboro of a car striking a tree.
Very first responders found Hatch, twenty one at the time, unconscious with severe head injuries, trapped on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Snow-slushed roads and too many drinks proved a toxic combination that night.
Hatch’s friend at the time was driving under the influence of alcohol when he took a acute turn on the slushy road, causing the car to spiral out of control and strike a tree.
The accident occurred right outside the home Hatch grew up in, and his parents were among the very first people at the scene.
“They were devastated. I was totally unconscious and there was nothing they could do,” Hatch said.
Hatch said very first responders later told him they feared he would not make it due to a gasping sound he made.
“I guess it was a very scary sound,” he said.
Hatch was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital and admitted into the neurosurgical intensive care unit. He was treated by doctors to attempt and heal his subdural hematoma — a head injury strong enough to burst blood vessels in the brain.
But he did not wake up until a few days later.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Hatch said. “I woke up to family and friends surrounding me telling me I was going to be OK, but I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
His injury was treatable without surgery and required only a week’s worth of doctors closely monitoring him before he was released.
“The very first thing I did when I got home was look at myself in the mirror,” Hatch said. “Luckily, all I had was a scar, but what freaked me out the most was the fact that I had a beard.”
“I thanked God that those were the only visible damages.”
Today, Hatch is still living out the devastating effects of his accident.
The accident caused Hatch to have some nerve harm, making it difficult to hear in his right ear.
He now suffers with tinnitus — which causes a ringing sound in the ears. “It’s annoying,” he said, “but I’m so fortunate that this is the only thing I have to deal with — it could’ve been so much worse.”