'I remember him being nicer,' Pat Baumgardner After the Accident

On a summer night in 2009, Elizabeth Baumgardner awoke to the sound of her mom screaming outside her room. At five years old she didn’t grasp the weight of what was happening to her family. While she and her brother scrambled to leave their room, her father was being rushed to the hospital.

“I hear my mom screaming manically from the living room,” she says. “I’m thinking I don’t know what’s going on, I'm still sleeping.”

On his way home, Elizabeth’s father, Patrick Baumgardner Sr. was in a severe motorcycle accident that would change the course of the Baumgardners’ lives. Her father’s friend Dave who witnessed the accident called her mother at 9:30 p.m. on the way to bring the family to the hospital. 

“Dave came to our house and we zoomed,” she said. “I have never been in a car that went that fast in my life.”

As a child she was not fully clued into what was going on. 

“I will never tell my dad this, but the only reason my 5 year old self got out of bed was because there was a bug in my room,” she said. 

Her 5 year old thoughts have stuck with her all of these years, her vivid imagination chronicling the night. 

“I remember he had to go in for a CT scan, and I hadn’t seen him so I thought he was standing up perfectly fine holding a cat,” she said. “Specifically a very angry orange cat.”

Her childlike perspective isn’t the only thing that shrouds this night in mystery. No one knows what happened to her dad. The doctors suspect that he was hit by a car, Patrick Baumgardner doesn’t remember, and Dave claims that he simply flipped over the front of his bike.

“My mom thinks Dave had something to do with it,” she said. “I overheard an argument between Dave and his wife, she said ‘How could you let this happen to him?’ and I told her that and I think it started this line of thinking.”

He was found near a fire hydrant, his helmet cracked open and his pelvis was fractured. His injuries left him bedridden for months. He now lacks feeling in one of his legs. In order to fix his pelvis, the nerves in his leg would inevitably be damaged. 

“It’s called drop foot, he can’t flex his foot at all. He has nerve damage in his calf as well,” she said. 

Before the accident, her dad was very active. He liked to fish, he was a plumber, as a kid he loved to do BMX.

“One of the only memories I have of him before is we were in a parking lot and he was carrying me on his shoulders,” she said. “Before the accident I remember him being nicer.” 

Today she wouldn’t say the same. 

“Today I think I would describe him as really mean, but I don’t think that’s enough,” she said. “It makes me feel bad to say that I think he's a downright awful horrible human being.”

He couldn’t get out of bed for six months following his accident. Everything he loved to do was put on pause. Even after recovery he was never able to enjoy his favorite activities with the same ease and ability as he used to. She suspects his change in life style made him miserable.

“I imagine that takes a toll, one day you can walk and the next you’re stuck in bed,” she said. 

Her dad was the breadwinner of the family. Her mom was a stay at home mom, taking care of her and her older brother, Patrick Jr. Her dad was a plumber during the day and a sanitation worker at night. These jobs were not possible after his accident. 

Her mother had to start working to ensure that the family was staying afloat. She has had many different jobs over the years, working as a teacher’s aide in Elizabeth’s school. Later she became a receptionist at the school. 

“It was a really bad job to give her because she is chronically late,” she joked.

Elizabeth recalls getting a job early on. She became a tutor in early high school to make some money for herself. 

“A kindergartener taught me that I write my threes wrong,” she said. Her life was very hectic and as a child she remembers being left to her own devices. She recalls a time in which she had to practice writing her numbers with her mother for school. She completed the assignment by herself, practicing her threes incorrectly and leaving the page of eights blank. Today she still writes her eights upside down. 

At sixteen, Elizabeth started to work at a Catholic Girls Summer Camp in New Hampshire for the entirety of the summer. She needed to work and make money, but she also found a way to escape her home in the Bronx for a few months. 

When her dad was able to take a job again, he struggled to keep a job. When he went back to work he worked a desk job for sanitation. He was fired after sleeping on the job during a garbage truck fire.

“Some may say my dad became an alcoholic, but he doesn’t think so,” she said. “There was a three day span where my dad would just not wake up. He drank too much with a new medication and put himself into a coma.”

That day was the first day that Elizabeth remembers being forgotten, something she would become used to as priorities shifted in their household. She was at her cousin’s house for the day and her mother forgot to pick her up, she ended up staying the night there. 

“My dad getting into an accident shifted the entire dynamic of my family,” she said. “What really sucks is it happened when I was so young I don’t know exactly what changed. I know everyone is a lot angrier.”

“There’s this quote online that’s like ‘my dad is the worst person alive and I’m his favorite daughter’ I think that encapsulates our relationship.”