A Life Renewed

Haldane student continues recovery from horrific crash

Theresa Timmons celebrated a day that nearly wasn’t.

On Sept. 23, a procession of family and friends followed as her mother pushed the teenager’s wheelchair across the lobby of Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla. Just through the glassed entrance stood members of the Continental Village Fire Department and Cortlandt-Peekskill Regional Paramedics.

Firefighters and paramedics rarely reunite with the people they save or closely follow their recoveries. But over the last year, the Haldane High School student has become part of the department’s family, so much so that its members pray for her before meetings, said Joseph Maffettone, the department’s chief.

The answer to their prayers smiled as the uniformed first responders presented her with a bouquet of flowers and took photos. Inside, everyone crowded into a second-floor room to celebrate Theresa’s upcoming 17th birthday on Sept. 25.

“This is a great journey that we get to follow,” said Maffettone.

The journey began with a crash on Route 9. On Dec. 15, 2023, Vlad Saban, a 17-year-old Haldane High School senior, lost control of his Toyota Prius, which left the road and hit a tree. Vlad was killed. His passenger, Theresa, was left in critical condition with a traumatic brain injury.

A year later, she has been transformed. Doctors brought her out of a medically induced coma in January, and the piece of skull they removed to relieve pressure on her brain has been replaced. In July, Theresa began speaking and is now writing, texting and laughing. On Dec. 10, using a wheelchair, Theresa returned to Haldane High School for a visit that brought the student body into the halls.

The teenager, whose family owns Homestyle Desserts Bakery, and who was familiar to anyone who bought ice cream at its Nelsonville location, is undergoing an arduous regime of occupational and physical therapy designed to restore the damaged partnership between brain and body. She is also taking remote classes at Haldane, with the goal of attending graduation with her class in June.

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Theresa said.

Saved by a ‘cocoon’

During a visit, hope decorated Theresa’s room at Blythedale. The shelves bulged with stuffed animals. An array of photos sent by Haldane friends filled some wall space, while well-wishes written on heart-shaped pieces of paper by students from P.S. 194, a Bronx K-8 school where one of her mother’s friends teaches, were hanging on the window. “You are amazing.” “You can do it.”

A guitar Theresa’s father, Jimmy, plays for her stood in a corner. Haldane faculty, staff and classmates visit regularly, as does Vlad’s mother, Liliya Shylivska. Theresa’s mother, Laura, sleeps overnight on a cot, as do Jimmy, Liliya and Laura’s boyfriend, Mike.

“I feel loved,” said Theresa.

First, she had to be saved.

Maffettone said Continental Village firefighters responding to the accident found “complete wreckage.” Attacking the doors and bottom of the wreck with cutting tools, they found Theresa in the back seat, unconscious and laying on her left side, protected in a “cocoon,” according to Maffettone.

“There was a complete tunnel around her,” said Maffettone, whose family has been buying baked goods from Homestyle for years and knew the Timmons family. “How she was positioned, it was amazing.”

Jennifer Hunt, a paramedic with Cortlandt-Peekskill Regional Paramedics, described Theresa’s physical condition as “multi-system” trauma. “She had anything and everything that could possibly be wrong with a patient going on,” said Hunt. “We had a lot of decisions to make in a very short timeframe.”

Hunt said that she and a colleague sedated Theresa and inserted an endotracheal tube, which is used when patients cannot breathe unaided. With her breathing stabilized, they decided to drive her to Westchester Medical Center rather than wait for a helicopter.

“Getting her definitive care was the priority at that point,” said Hunt. “I didn’t know if we’d be seeing her on her next birthday.”

‘In my head, that’s not her’

Laura Timmons, who co-owns Homestyle, had expected to see her eldest daughter that evening at the family’s home on Route 9 in Philipstown. Laura left her brother’s house in Cold Spring with Mike to pick up her younger daughter, Giana, from a dance at the Garrison School. At 7:55 p.m., minutes before the crash, Laura traded text messages with Theresa, who told her mother she was heading home.

Laura said that as she drove to the Garrison School, another of her brothers texted to warn that an accident had shut down Route 9. At the school, parents talked about how they would have to detour, but Laura convinced police to let her go down Route 9 to get home.

Because her children “light the house up like a tree,” Laura immediately noticed when she arrived that Theresa was not there. She called her phone but “it was dead.” She called Vlad’s phone — no answer. By then, she knew the accident had occurred just south of her house, over the county line, in Cortlandt.

“I texted both of them together: ‘There’s an accident; where are you?’ Nothing,” she recalled. “In my head — that’s not her. She wouldn’t be down there.”

Thirty seconds is how long Laura estimates it took her and her boyfriend to reach the accident scene. She took a photo of the car. Did the wreckage resemble a Prius? Was a girl among the victims?

Someone sent her a photo they took of the rescue. In one way, she said, it was beautiful, because the first responders had saved Theresa’s life. But the photo was also “not so beautiful,” she said, because of Vlad. A memorial at the accident scene south of the Stone House on Route 9 honors his memory.

“My heart is broken for my son, and it’s heartbreaking for me to watch Theresa going through what she is going through,” said Liliya. “I love and care for Theresa very much, and I will do everything in my power to help her to make a full recovery.”

A community responds

Her recovery began in a coma.

The girl brought by paramedics to Westchester Medical Center had a broken arm and other injuries, but her body had, amazingly, survived largely intact. Her swollen head, however, exemplified the extent of the trauma. The impact had shifted her brain, and if it did not shift back, she would die, said Laura. Jimmy later told her he overheard someone say Theresa had a 5 percent chance of survival.

“But I didn’t know any of this,” said Laura. “In my mind, she’s alive, she’s going to be fine and she’ll be home by summer.”

For months, Theresa wore a protective helmet while the piece of her skull sat in a freezer. Her head swelled again due to hydrocephalus, an accumulation of fluid. Doctors inserted a shunt, but she had another setback when she came down with meningitis, an infection-induced inflammation of the fluid and membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.

Theresa had been credited with coming to the aid of students being bullied. Her mother had repeatedly donated money and food to fundraisers and dropped off Homestyle goodies to the police and homeless shelters. Now the family needed help. A GoFundMe campaign has raised nearly $63,000. Our Lady of Loretto has held healing Masses for Theresa. A closet in her room at Blythedale is filled with cards.

Laura said she also found support in a waiting area, where the families of critically ill patients at Westchester Medical Center congregate, sometimes sleeping overnight. Laura said she brought cookies to one man who’d been sleeping there for two weeks.

“I’m not the only one suffering,” she said. “I can make a cookie tray and say to somebody, ‘Are you OK?’ or give them advice or say, ‘This is good here and this isn’t that great here, make sure you check on this.’ ”

Two weeks after the accident, Laura visited the Peekskill Volunteer Ambulance Corps to connect first responders with Theresa by Facetime. Police, firefighters and paramedics gathered at Homestyle in Peekskill in May for an ice cream social.

“People don’t think, ‘Who saved my life? I want to meet them,’ ” said Laura. “They went through something horrible that night, too.”

Recovery begins

By February, Theresa was responding to commands. The following month, a contingent of family, first responders and friends lined a hallway at the Westchester Medical Center while a paramedic wheeled her bed over a stretch of red carpet. She was strong enough to relocate to Blythedale.

In April, Theresa returned to Westchester to have the section of her skull replaced. “From that day on, she just skyrocketed,” Laura said.

Her progress has been chronicled by her mother on Facebook. Videos show Theresa beginning to write, swiping an iPad screen, performing arm curls with a bottle of water and painting on a piece of paper.

“Her first writing, you couldn’t even read it, and then it started to get better, and she was writing like crazy,” said Laura. “Then she started talking and eating.”

Her first words in July: “I love you, mom.”

That month she had her first food and drink since the accident. When asked how her Homestyle donut tasted, she replied, “Amazing.”

In addition to speech therapy, Theresa is relearning how to dress herself, sit and stand unassisted, and walk. Giana and her brother, James, are learning how to lift her.

Laura’s videos show Theresa being led through exercises: pumping her legs on a peddling machine, taking tentative steps using a specialized walker with a harness  and learning how to operate a battery-powered wheelchair. The family will need to install a wheelchair lift at home, and Laura plans to use some of the money people donated.

“I’m grateful that she’s alive, that she’s with me and that she’s doing pretty good,” she said.