Mia Selby speaks for the first time about life-changing Kinkuna Beach crash and miracle recovery
For the first time brave teen Mia Selby has relived the horror day she went from celebrating the ‘best night of her life’ to suffering catastrophic injuries after a 4WD beach party went horribly wrong. SEE VIDEO
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When Mia Selby arrived at Kinkuna beach on Friday, June 30, the beach party spread over the broad expanse of sand was in full swing.
Around 50 four wheel drive vehicles were arranged in a ring on the sand with headlights pointed inwards, illuminating another vehicle doing “skids” (burnouts) in the centre of the ring to the honks and cheers of hundreds of spectators.
Fireworks lit up the night sky at regular intervals, revealing other vehicles doing skids elsewhere along the beach.
This was the first time Mia had gone to a Kinkuna beach party, an unplanned turn of events while out celebrating her 18th birthday and that of her best friend, Lucy Stanton-Bovis just one day apart on June 26 and 27.
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The two friends had been taken out by Lucy’s older sisters, Maddie and Charlotte, and Charlotte’s boyfriend Anthony Cougle who Mia had met for the first time that night.
Aged 29, Anthony was the oldest of the group with Charlotte aged 22 and Maddie 21.
While Mia had often gone out with friends before, one of her friends, Thomas, called to tell her to be careful that night, saying he “had a weird feeling”.
Mia’s mother, Cody, had a similar premonition.
“I didn’t want her to go out that night,” Cody said.
“I just had a bad feeling about it; I said ‘I don’t think you should go’”.
But Mia shook off the words of caution, wanting to enjoy her birthday celebration with friends.
“I had a couple of people tell me not to go, but being freshly 18 I just wanted to go out and have fun,” Mia said.
The group’s first stop was a pub in Childers, where Mia and Lucy had their first legal drinks as adults.
After drinking in the pub for a while, they went to a BWS bottle-shop to buy more alcohol then made the 20-minute drive east to Lucy’s home in Buxton where she lived with her sisters.
While they were partying at the home one of the group saw a Snapchat post about a party at Kinkuna Beach.
“It was supposed to have been cancelled, but then people still ended up going anyway,” Mia said.
“And that’s when we decided we’d go.”
Soon after arriving at the beach around 9pm in Charlotte’s black Ford Ranger ute, the group left the car and walked along the beach, taking in the sights of the rollicking party.
“I was having so much fun,” Mia said.
“At the time, I thought ‘this is the best night of my life’; I’d never had so much fun.”
Normally “terrified” of fireworks, Mia found them beautiful and entrancing that night.
“That was the first time in my life that I haven’t been scared of fireworks, which is just a weird thought,” she said.
“Because an hour after that, the crash happened.”
In Mia’s patchy memory of how the rest of the night unfolded, Charlotte was driving the Ford Ranger on the beach with Anthony in the front passenger seat.
Mia was sitting in the back seat on the right behind Charlotte, with Maddie in the middle and Lucy in the other window seat.
After deciding to go home around midnight, Charlotte turned the car to head towards the 4WD ramp which caused it to roll “several times”, according to police reports.
“I remember holding on to the bar above the window, and my head hitting my arm really hard,” Mia said.
“That’s all I remember.”
Two LifeFlight helicopters took Mia, Charlotte, Lucy and Maddie to Bundaberg Hospital while Anthony was transported to the Sunshine Coast University Hospital in a critical condition with serious back injuries.
Her friends, Lucy and Maddie, sustained a dislocated elbow and dislocated collarbone, and were discharged the following day.
Mia’s injuries were far more serious.
With her internal organs forced upwards through her diaphragm, a fractured lower spine and broken teeth, medical staff at Bundaberg Hospital put Mia into an induced coma while they tried to stem massive internal bleeding.
After receiving a call at 1.30am, Cody rushed to Bundaberg Hospital with Mia’s father, Jono.
By the time Cody arrived staff had administered four bags of blood, cut off Mia’s clothes and enveloped her body in a heated trauma blanket.
While the staff tried to prepare her for what she was about to see, Cody struggles even now to convey the shock of seeing her oldest daughter in the ER for the first time.
“She had blood all over her nose … all we could see was her head and the neck brace,” said Cody, choking up now at the memory.
“And then … I haven’t really talked about this.”
Surgeons at Bundaberg Hospital patched Mia up before she was flown to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital for further surgery.
Mia lost her left kidney, with surgeons able to save her spleen, liver and large intestine which were severely damaged.
After the lifesaving operation Mia was brought out of the coma, with her first thoughts being for the welfare of her friends.
“It was probably the weirdest, scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life; I had no idea where I was” Mia said.
“She was asking where her friend was, and if everyone else was okay,” Cody said.
On the first night after being brought out of the coma, Mia woke up in excruciating pain.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in so much pain in my life,” Mia said.
“I could feel every broken rib that I had and my spine, and because everything internally got so screwed up my stomach and everything felt horrible.”
To make matters worse, Mia was allergic to the pain medication which caused her to hallucinate.
“It was like a nightmare,” she said.
By July 12, Mia had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to Hervey Bay Hospital, closer to home.
Cody said Mia was “hysterical” when staff tried to transfer her into an ambulance at the Royal, reliving the trauma of the crash which she still feels whenever she needs to get into a car.
“Prior to the accident, going on drives and being in a car was my favourite thing ever,” Mia said.
“Now I will do anything to avoid getting in a car. I have really bad panic attacks, … I almost feel like I’m reliving what happened.”
Mia stayed in Hervey Bay Hospital for around one week despite staff at Hervey Bay Hospital telling her she would be there for around a month.
Now, around one month after returning home, Mia and Cody are in a regular round of GP appointments and waiting for further consultations at Hervey Bay Hospital.
Mia has moved from a caravan in the backyard of the family home to a recliner chair in the living room, with lying flat on a bed still too painful for her healing spine.
Cody sleeps on the couch most nights to attend to Mia when she wakes from frequent nightmares, and help her to stand up, shower and to do her hair; Mia finds the loss of her independence to be one of the most challenging aspects of her recovery
“It’s a weird feeling to be 18 and not wanting to be alone at any point, because I was the complete opposite before it happened,” Mia said.
The QPS Forensic Crash Unit officer investigating the crash, Senior Constable Phil Peereboom, said on Thursday the investigation is “quite protracted and convoluted”, and is waiting on a Queensland Health toxicology report. No charges have been laid.
Despite the upheaval the events of that night brought to their lives, Mia and Cody said they bear no grudges against Charlotte and are entirely focused on the long road of recovery and winning back the independence Mia was starting to realise on the cusp of adulthood.
“I just wish that it hadn’t happened, but I can’t change that,” Cody said.
“We’re pretty much just focused on Mia, and trying to help her out as best as we can.
“Because before it happened, she was out trying to get a job and she was going to the gym trying to get her life happening, and then obviously this put a big halt on that.”
Mia is consoled by the knowledge that her friends survived the crash and were not seriously injured, but is troubled by thoughts of how different her life would be now if she had made different decisions that night.
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“I’m glad everyone’s okay, that was the first thing I worried about when I woke up,” she said.
“But what if I didn’t go, or what if I got out of the car?
“What if I didn’t do this one thing beforehand that could have stopped it from happening?
“There’s a lot of regret.”
Mirroring the advice Thomas and Cody gave her before leaving home on what should have been the best night of her life, Mia cautions other young people against the risk-taking behaviour that she thought was so exciting at first.
Just the day after the crash involving Mia, three people aged between 17 and 19 were injured from a crash on Coonar Beach, near Kinkuna, with police saying drugs and alcohol played a role.
“At the time I didn’t really think about the consequences of it,” she said.
“But looking back, it’s a pretty dangerous thing. And it happens every week.”
Donate to Mia Selby’s GoFundMe fundraiser at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-support-mias-family
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