PATRICK CO., Va. – Lauren Worley is a senior at Patrick County High School and right now, she is in the fight of her life.
On Dec. 16, she, and her boyfriend Micah Underwood, were returning home after Christmas shopping and dinner when their lives changed forever, they were hit head-on by a suspected drunk driver.
[RELATED: Car crash in Patrick County leaves two high schoolers hospitalized]
“We don’t understand why this happened,” said Chris Worley, Lauren’s father.
Her parents said they were getting ready for bed when her mother, Mandy, had a feeling she needed to check Life360 — an app to see the location of your family.
“Something told me to check Life360 just to see where she was at cause I felt uneasy and I could see that she had been in the location for one minute,” said Mandy. “I thought, okay, maybe it is a cell service issue and it wasn’t picking up, so I kept uploading and uploading. She stayed in that area for five minutes.”
Mandy said she jumped in her car and followed the map to the point where the kids’ car stopped moving. Her father said he hung back, but while looking at his app he noticed something off.
“I could pinpoint her location to that particular curve and her location was on the inside of that curve which made no sense,” Chris said.
When Lauren’s mom got to the scene of the accident, what she saw was a bone-chilling nightmare.
“When I topped over the hill and saw the fire trucks and the rescue squad, I knew it was bad,” Mandy said.
Mandy said she was trying to get to her daughter at that point, while Lauren’s dad came from another side.
“As I was going there, [a deputy] pulled my shirt back and he said, ‘You can’t go in there’” said Mandy. “I said, ‘I just want to know, is she dead or is she alive?’ and he said, ‘She’s breathing.’ I said, ‘Can I please just come put my hands on her and pray?’”
Chris said it was one of the worst crash scenes he had ever seen.
“I saw the car and I knew she was dead and I dropped like any parent and said ‘Don’t take my daughter,’” Chris said. “The car was completely mangled, especially on the passenger side. When the [roof] come up, I seen what I seen, I will never forget that scene, my baby was hanging on by a thread.”
Lauren was then whisked away by helicopter to Roanoke Memorial Hospital. It was then that they learned the full extent of her catastrophic injuries.
“Her skull had been pushed back into her brain, it was actually resting on her brain, she had broken her femur, broken her hip, broken her jaw, her carotid artery was dissected,” Chris and Mandy said.
They said now, it’s a waiting game, and the power of prayer.
“What we need is prayers, we don’t need anything else,” said Mandy. “Prayers is all that we need because god is showing what he can do. The more people that know, the more people that will pray.”
They said doctors tell them the next few days are the most critical for Lauren.
If you would like to support the Worley family, a GoFundMe can be found here or by clicking below.