“You always think that these things can’t happen to you, and they can’t happen to your loved ones, but it definitely is something we’re not immune from,” Skates said.
She soon realized it was Parks and her scooter lying in the road. While stopped at a traffic light, the 20-year-old UF microbiology sophomore couldn’t take her eyes off of the crash. Graylin Skates, Parks’ second cousin and roommate at the time of the crash, had just said goodbye to Parks and was headed out of town for a concert when she noticed someone lying on the ground. “It was very mentally taxing getting back into school and going from being a straight-A student with not an extreme amount of effort to now I have to really try to remember things,” she said. Focusing on classwork and even finding items in the grocery store are now more strenuous activities because of the damage her brain endured, she said. She said the incident no longer consumes most of her waking moments the way it did for the first year after the crash Parks said she’s lucky that she is still able to walk and function normally throughout the day. “It definitely changed my outlook on life.” “I wouldn’t change what happened to me because I wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t,” she said.
She said she’s grateful for the opportunity because it allows her to advocate for people like Lambert and Paxton, who no longer can. Parks serves on Florida Not One More’s executive board as a part of the state outreach team, which is responsible for finding the contact information for district representatives and assigning the information to members for call-in days. This semester, students at the university created Florida Not One More, a UF student organization advocating for safer roads. The frequent pedestrian fatalities and injuries around UF campus have incited calls for legislative action from students and faculty. The crash occurred less than a year before the deaths of Maggie Paxton and Sophia Lambert, two UF students killed in pedestrian crashes on West University Avenue. She was in her freshman year of college at the time. Parks suffered a traumatic brain injury, two collapsed lungs, a broken collar bone and rib, a ruptured spleen and a broken frontal sinus. She spent about a week and a half at UF Health Shands Hospital and then another week in rehab.
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