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For Survivors, A Rough Road

John Valenti

May 4, 2003

Christopher Memoli, 18, spells out words using a page of letters to communicate with his case manager, Tami Gladstone, at his rehabilitation center. (Newsday/ Jim Peppler)

Seated at the table, Christopher Memoli is surrounded by girls. He is 18 and in a flirtatious mood. Off in the corner Eminem screams on the stereo.

A high school senior, Memoli watches as a young woman massages his right hand. His eyes grow wide. He looks at her, looks at me. He looks at the 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper in front of him -- the one with all the alphabet letters laid out like a keyboard; the one in the black loose-leaf binder that has become his constant companion -- and shakes his hand loose.

He begins to move his index finger fast and furious across the page, pointing at letters.

"N-O E-N-G-A-G-E-M-E-N-T R-I-N-G."

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He winks and all of us in the room -- the three young women, who are physical therapists; his mother, Debbie; me -- break out in a fit of uncontrolled laughter. Even here, even now, Chris Memoli remains ever the good-natured class clown. His dark hair shaved short and his boyish face flush with a sense of the mischievous, he lets out a moan that is what passes for a laugh these days and struggles to form a smile, though it doesn't quite happen.

Outside the window, springtime is bursting forth from the shell of a long, dreary winter. Miles from here -- it might as well be a million -- Sachem High School is closed for spring break and the kids are off doing whatever kids do when there is no school.

You tell yourself that Memoli should be with them, not here. But the car accident changed all that. It took all of those carefree days with it.

So here he is in a third-floor room at Transitions of Long Island, a neuro-rehabilitation center in Manhasset run by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital, his muscles being stretched, massaged, flexed. So here he is -- he and those therapists -- trying to prod his now near-useless body into some sense of usefulness. Fighting to regain a life. Or something that will pass for it.

"When I look at Chris, it breaks my heart," Debbie Memoli said, earlier, over coffee and between tears. "He's 18. He's got a life ahead of him. But, I don't ask why it happened. I'm not going to get any answers. I'm just fortunate I didn't lose him."

For the next two weeks, in this newspaper, you will read about those not as fortunate as Chris Memoli. About people who died. Because for the past year a team of Newsday reporters studied a year-in-the-life of fatal motor vehicle accidents on Long Island.

What emerges is a sobering picture of life -- and of death -- on our roads.

But what about the thousands of accident victims across Long Island who are not killed, whose lives are changed forever in those fateful moments on some anonymous patch of asphalt or concrete? Who, like Memoli, come out of accidents left struggling to find some semblance of the life they had before.

For Memoli, it all began last July. He and some friends went to a house party. Some girls were there. The homeowners weren't.Some of the kids drank, depending on whom you believe. Some swam in the pool. A couple even climbed into bed, according to a written statement given to police.

Somewhere near dawn the next morning, Memoli found himself watching "A Bronx Tale" with a girl named Michelle D. Mermigas.

She is from Holtsville and attended Sachem with Memoli, who is from Lake Grove. He was 17. So was she. She had told her mother she was staying the night with a girlfriend in Farmingville.

Now, as the sun started to rise, Mermigas decided she did not like what was going on in the house. When two of the boys decided to go on a bagel run, she said she wanted to go, too, if just to get out of the house for a while. But by the time Mermigas reached the driveway, the boys were gone. So she asked a friend for the keys to a Jeep Cherokee.

Mermigas only had a junior license. She wasn't supposed to drive. Her mother said she did not have permission from the vehicle owner -- the girlfriend's father -- to drive the Jeep. But no sooner had she gotten behind the wheel than there was Memoli, a beer in hand, according to the statement Mermigas gave police, getting into the Jeep to go with her.

It was all pedestrian stuff. Until, that is, the drive back from the store. Two of the boys were in one car. Mermigas was still driving the Jeep with Memoli, who was not wearing his seat belt, in the passenger seat. Out on Portion Road, east of Avenue C in Ronkonkoma, Mermigas decided to play a little cat-and-mouse game with the other boys and so she tried to pass their car. "I wanted to have some fun," she wrote in her statement. But no sooner had she pulled around a line of cars and stepped on the gas than, suddenly, a car in front of her stopped.

Mermigas had not been drinking. She had no alcohol in her system. She was never charged with a crime. But she was an inexperienced driver, her mother said. And she panicked. When she did she turned the wheel too hard to the right and lost control. She drove off the road, hit a guardrail.

The Jeep flipped at least three times, according to eyewitnesses, and hit a tree.