![]() ![]() And I felt like I had to reprocess everything all over again.” ‘I just assumed that the officers knew what they were doing and they could tell who was impaired and who wasn’t.’ Valerie Cavoorisīut, she said, learning that the driver was a police officer “completely shifted my entire narrative of the situation. “I just assumed that the officers knew what they were doing and they could tell who was impaired and who wasn’t,” she said. But police told her that officers on the scene thought the driver was not impaired. Valerie had thought it strange that the driver who had slammed into the family’s car had refused to take a breath test. The officer, David Mascarella, refused a breath test, and police never sought a warrant to require him to submit to alcohol testing, according to police records. The results showed that he had consumed no alcohol. Only later did they learn that the driver, David Mascarella, was a member of the force.Īt the hospital, detectives asked Kevin to perform a breath test. No one told Kevin and Valerie at the hospital that the driver who rear-ended their car without evidence of braking was an off-duty Suffolk County Police Department officer. ![]() “He said, ‘Yeah! I can finally be happy again.'” What they were never told “I said, ‘And your brother too,'” she recalled. “So, you and daddy will be home this weekend?” he asked. Valerie told Bastian that the family would be together. Riordan went home seven weeks after the crash. And it’s all growth from here, and then something major happens like this and, all of a sudden, you’re celebrating these little things again.” Kevin said: “You don’t think as a parent that you’re going to have to make a big deal about these milestones again. Looking back to Riordan’s infancy, Valerie said, “It was like watching him go through all the same milestones that we’d already seen, just in fast forward over the course of months rather than years.” ![]() Little by little, Riordan sat up unsupported, pulled himself to a standing position, and took his first steps with help. Credit: Cavooris familyĪfter three weeks, doctors transferred Riordan to inpatient rehabilitation services at St. Riordan Cavooris had to relearn how to eat after crash. Hearing him speak for the first time in weeks, Valerie cried and called Kevin. He said his first word, “more,” to ask for the cheese puffs his parents used to entice Riordan to feed himself. He sipped chocolate milk through a straw and took pudding from a spoon. Two weeks after the crash, doctors removed a feeding tube to allow Riordan to begin using his mouth to eat and drink - first during the day, and then at night, as well. He clenched his fingers, wiggled his toes, lifted his arms and kicked his legs. Little by little, in the manner of a maturing infant, he gained the capacity to command his body. Riordan was unable to use his lips or tongue, couldn’t swallow or move his hands or legs. He had no muscle control, no muscle tone whatsoever. “When he first woke up, it was like having a newborn baby,” Valerie said. The initial outlines of the toll suffered by Riordan emerged quickly. ![]() Tubing rises from his skull and descends into his throat.Īn off-duty Suffolk officer escaped alcohol testing after he fractured 2-year-old Riordan Cavooris’ skull in a car crash. His neck is braced by a stabilizing collar. It nestles beside his shoulder in a photograph taken from above. Bastian picked out a green Ninja Turtle for Riordan. The children’s unit at Stony Brook University Hospital was stocked with stuffed animals. Life was traumatically new, too, for Riordan’s wrestling partner and big brother, Bastian, then 4. Would he walk or run normally again? Would the traumatic brain injury cause him to suffer seizures or limit the type of job he’d have in the future? She and Riordan’s father, Kevin Cavooris, were crossing the first hours of a new life that began when a pickup truck rear-ended the family’s car at more than 50 miles per hour.įirst, there was Riordan’s survival, then there was the radically altered future that had been thrust upon him in the moment of impact. “Nobody could tell me if he was alive or if he was going to make it,” his mother, Valerie Cavooris, remembered. A pediatric neurosurgeon cleared bone fragments from the surface of Riordan’s brain and refitted fragments of his skull like puzzle pieces. Two-year-old Riordan Cavooris was deep in a medically induced coma. ![]()
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