Nina Colasanto, 19, of New Ipswich, is on the long road to recovery after she suffered life-threatening injuries in a single car crash in Rindge last week.
“Nina was severely injured in the crash,” her mother Christina Bassett said in a Facebook post on Life in New Ipswich on Thursday. “She has broken vertebrae, a broken arm, broken pelvis, broken ribs and is burned over 40% of her body. She is stable and has made it through the first operation to rebuild her arm. Her first skin graft operation is scheduled for Monday.”
Bassett thanked the community for their “outpouring of love.”
Colasanto was a passenger in a 2017 Tesla Model X that crashed on Perry Road in Rindge Wednesday night around 8 p.m. Colasanto was taken to UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts following the crash.
The driver of the Tesla, Travis Olson, 17, of Rindge, and the second passenger, Chelsea Holombo, 17, of New Ipswich, were taken to the Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough with serious but non-life threatening injuries.
“Chelsea and Travis are home and recovering,” Ethan Reuben, Holombo’s brother-in-law said in a Facebook post Saturday.
According to Reuben, Olson carried Holombo from the crash and tried to help Colasanto out of the burning Tesla. Olson was eventually helped by others who arrived on scene, including Nick Barnhart of Perry Road who arrived with a fire extinguisher to make her extraction easier.
“We’re definitely praying for her,” Michelle Barnhart of Perry Road said Thursday morning. Barnhart and her husband, Nick Barnhart, were some of the first on the scene of the crash.
The 2017 Tesla Model X had been traveling eastbound on Perry Road when it left the roadway, struck a tree, and split in two, state police said in a press release Wednesday night.
“The car was completely split in half,” Barnhart said. “A clean split. It’s crazy.”
“The vehicle had then ignited. The occupants were initially assisted by private citizens in the area, as emergency services responded,” state police said.
They had been ejected from the Tesla, Barnhart said, and initially Olson had attempted to pull Colasanto out, Barnhart said. “The flames were so big that he couldn’t get to her.”
Barnhart said the crash occurred about 20 feet from her property line. “We could see the flames from our window,” Barnhart said. “It was 8 o’clock at night. We were pretty much settling in and we heard what sounded like an explosion. It went from a silent night to an explosion. … And we looked out the window and we saw the vehicle on fire in the woods.”
Barnhart, her husband Nick and their 13-year-old son Ethan immediately went into action. Because the family heats with a wood stove, they have a large fire extinguisher in their basement. Nick Barnhart immediately went to get that fire extinguisher and Michelle Barnhart called 911.
Nick and Ethan Barnhart got to the scene first. Michelle Barnhart, who uses a wheelchair, didn’t get to the scene for another two minutes. When father and son arrived on scene, Nick Barnhart saw the fire and heard Colasanto from inside it screaming.
“You could hear a female in the vehicle just screaming,” Barnhart said.
Nick Barnhart told his son to go back to the house and then focused on getting the woman out of the car, Michelle Barnhart said. Ethan, though, stayed and watched until Michelle arrived two minutes later and told him again to go back to the house, she said. It was an intense scene for her son to take in, she said. The screaming, the flames, the smell of burning skin. “This is a moment that will shape him,” Barnhart said of her son.
A group of teenagers from another car stopped at the scene as well and helped Nick Barnhart, who used his fire extinguisher to douse the flames, Barnhart said. Her husband and the teens pulled Colasanto from the car that was on fire and exploding occasionally.
“I am confident, if we weren’t home with that fire extinguisher Nina would not be alive in the hospital today,” Barnhart said, adding the first responder was a single police officer in a cruiser, who arrived 9 minutes after Barnhart had called 911. “She wouldn’t have made it. … We had her out in the first two minutes.”
Another neighbor, who is a nurse, tended to Nina once she was out, but they feared Colasanto was too close to the fire.
“So that was a lithium-ion battery that was on fire, which was pretty scary,” Barnhart said. “Every time it hit another cell in the battery it exploded again.”
Although it’s not advisable to move a car crash victim, the women knew they needed to get her away from the exploding Tesla. Being a nurse, the neighbor was able to gauge that it was safe to move her. Nina was awake an conscious and able to give Michelle Barnhart her mother’s phone number, which Michelle Barnhart immediately used to call Colasanto’s mother.
Barnhart said about an hour after the crash firefighters were still trying to put out the blaze. With no fire hydrants on the road, fire tankers from across the region responded. Barnhart remembers the 8th tanker full of water arriving and still firefighters couldn’t stop the blaze. Perry Road is a through road, about two miles long, with a slight curve on a hill at which crashes frequently occur, Barnhart said.
“That’s a spot that’s had multiple accidents before,” but usually cars end up in the woods without much damage. “Actually just two months ago another vehicle had crashed at that same spot coming down that same hill, an inexperienced driver maybe,” Barnhart said. “A lot of kids speed down this road.”
Barnhart said she thinks it was a combination of sand on the road and speed.
“They must of caught a little sand and he must of lost complete control,” she said. “That car must have been going about 80 or 90 miles per hour. The front half just exploded.”
State police said Wednesday that all aspects of the crash are still under investigation, but that it does appear that speed was a factor in the crash.
Anyone with any information related to the crash is encouraged to contact Trooper First Class Bryan Plamondon at (603) 223-8677 or by email at bryan.plamondon@dos.nh.gov.
Editor’s note: this story was last updated Sunday, Dec. 30, at 5 p.m.