Family waiting for answers after Northland parking lot crash left victim with brain injury
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tuesday marked one year since a highly unusual Northland crash changed one family’s life forever.
The high-speed crash happened in a Northland parking lot as the victim sat in his parked car.
Bobby Brown, 43, is a father and U.S. Navy Veteran. He had dreams of opening a religious bookstore with his sister, according to Patricia Reynolds.
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His life changed Labor Day weekend Sept. 3, 2023, as he sat in his parked car at Hodge Park. According to Kansas City police, at 10:30 that night, a Honda Accord went north through the park winding drive at a high rate of speed.
When the driver failed to make the curve, the Accord slammed into Brown’s Volkswagen Tiguan, sending it onto its top. Brown was taken to Liberty Memorial Hospital with a traumatic brain injury.
A shunt was placed into his head to drain fluid and he suffered two strokes.
“They kind of said you might consider just letting him go because he’ll probably never regain any brain function,” his sister, Reynolds, explained.
In the year since, progress has been slow. After a month in intensive care and several more months in long-term care, he’s still in a Johnson County rehab facility, unable to talk, lift his head or sit up. The family is hopeful as he’s recently learned to blink once for yes and twice for no and smile.
They’ve also hoped there would be charges in the case, or they would hear something from prosecutors. Police quickly identified the driver who was not injured along with a passenger in the car who suffered severe injuries. Reynolds says she was told by investigators they turned over the case to prosecutors in November of 2023.
“Someone almost died. For months we thought they were going to die,” she said.
Tuesday, for the first time, immediately after FOX4’s calls to the Clay County Prosecutor’s Office with questions about the investigation, Reynolds said she received a call directly from Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson.
“There are legal and ethical prohibitions in place limiting the amount of information our office can discuss publicly. We are currently in communication with a representative of the family for the person injured in the crash and are working toward achieving a just outcome for everyone involved,” Thompson said in a statement to FOX4.
Reynolds said she’s not sure what that outcome might be.
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“It would hopefully come with some repercussions, the fact that he will likely never be more than what he is right now. He’ll probably be in a facility for the rest of his life, he won’t be able to feed himself, take care of himself ever again,” Reynolds said.
But in a park that’s still filled with tire tracks a year later, she hopes other drivers take notice.
“Someone could die, even not a person in their parked car. If you are doing 80 miles per hour through a parking lot, there’s a lot of awful things that could happen.”
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