Comatose and near death, Melissa lay in Frankford Hospital- Torresdale Campus for weeks after the January 2003 accident. One doctor attributed her recovery to the "plasticity" of her youthful brain; she was27 at the time. A roadside memorial marks the spot along Route 413 where the drunk driver hit their car.
- Seeking Jasta
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Seeking Jasta
A stunning tragedy took her daughter and her memory. Each day, she fights to get another bit of them back.
The brain, he said, is the texture of firm Jell-O, and the skull in most places is smooth. When the brain is shaken, it can slide along this smooth surface and minimize injury.
But the bottom of the skull is scalloped and parts of the brain cradled there are often damaged when shaken in automobile accidents.
One such part is the temporal lobe, which includes the hippocampus, a sea horse-shaped structure that coordinates memories and dispatches them to other parts of the brain for storage.
When the hippocampus is injured, he said, the brain has difficulty creating new memories - a person can forget what happened 10 minutes earlier.
In addition, with a damaged hippocampus, a person can lose memories that had not already been completely stored in other parts of the brain - a process that can take months.
This, Chatterjee said, could explain why Melissa's recent memories of Jasta were lost.
One other area of the brain commonly damaged in automobile accidents is the orbito-frontal cortex. When this part of the brain is shaken, he said, a person can become "disinhibited, distractable, and judgments may be off."
A person may lack discipline, he said, seem immature.
Melissa's best friend, Erin Doyle, jokingly blames Melissa for making her gain weight, because Melissa is always wanting to go to Friendly's for ice cream - a place Melissa never went before the accident.
A crushing loss
Dan Jones was at the hospital every day with Melissa, then moved into her aunt's house with her. But a year after the accident, Jones ended the relationship."She was totally crushed," Melissa's mother said.
"He made it like he cared and loved me," Melissa said. "But he up and disappeared."
Jones said he never stopped loving Melissa. But she had changed and he couldn't deal with her family.
"I wanted something I wasn't going to get," he said. "I wanted my girlfriend back. She was like a little kid. Her family controlled her."
"I kissed her one day. And they said, 'Don't kiss her.' They said she wasn't ready. I couldn't even show my girlfriend affection."
Melissa's mother said Jones was correct that the family felt Melissa wasn't ready for a relationship.
"Her mind was only up to a 15-year-old at the time," Daubenspeck said.
Melissa's family does not blame Jones for the accident, but the family was extremely protective of Melissa, and Jones understands why. "That was their daughter and their granddaughter," he said.
"I still feel guilty," he said. "I work a lot. That's how I get through the day, I guess. . . . I think about her all the time. I took responsibility for that action back then. I blamed myself for the longest time."
Jones had two kids before he met Melissa. (He has since had a third.) He said the tragedy had made him a better father. When his daughter fell off a bunk bed and punctured her kidney not long ago, he didn't leave the hospital for two weeks. He said that was a result of his experience with Melissa and Jasta.
