A 15-year-old Laguna Hills High School student is in critical condition after a crash with a suspected drunk driver that also injured two others.
A member of the school’s water polo team named Alexya Garcia was involved in a crash on Wednesday evening near Paseo de Valencia and Los Alisos Boulevard. She has since been in the ICU.
According to a GoFundMe set up by Garcia’s cousin Leslie Zaragoza, the money is intended to help pay for Garcia’s medical care and for “legal fees to pay for an attorney to seek justice on her behalf,” as well as to benefit the other victims of the crash, a friend of Garcia’s and that friend’s mother.
“My aunt will have to take time off of work as alexya is in the hospital in ICU and will need care after, she will be having a second surgery in the near future to fix an enormous injury caused by this accident,” Zaragoza wrote. “Alexya is a sweet, kind hearted person, she’s very silly and caring. She loves water polo and music. She’s a teen who just started high school (LHHS)she’s a sister, an aunt, a cousin and a friend.”
Garcia’s brother Alex Garcia told KTLA’s Chip Yost that what was expected to be a three-hour surgery turned into a nine-hour ordeal.
“She had so much internal bleeding that they had to take out pieces of her small intestine. They took out her appendix,” he said. “She has a scar [running the length of her torso]. She fractured her aorta, she has broken ribs, she had a whole bunch of blood in her lungs. She’s bruised [where the seatbelt was] and has a fractured shoulder.”
