Family gets vacation refund after devastating car crash | 7 On Your Side
NEW JERSEY (WABC) -- A family turned to 7 On Your Side for help when they couldn't get a refund for a trip after their 20-year-old daughter was involved in a terrible car crash.
A car accident that killed two drivers last July when one was going the wrong way on the Garden State Parkway was covered on Eyewitness News.
A teenage girl was in the back seat of the car and survived, miraculously, but months later was still in the hospital and could not walk.
Her family had planned a big group vacation but when the injuries forced them to cancel and they couldn't get a refund, they turned to Nina Pineda and 7 On Your Side.
"Cadence said, 'Call my mom. I think my legs are broken.' And I was like, What do you mean?" said the victim's mother Taryn Dabice.
Taryn remembers every second of that early morning.
"I ran in in the middle of all the fire trucks and I saw her duffel bag on the ground and I lost it," Taryn said. "I said, 'That's my daughter's' and the cop came over and said, 'She went to Hackensack.'"
Her daughter was in the back of a rideshare on her way home to Pompton Plains from her boyfriend's apartment when the car was struck by a woman driving north in the southbound lanes.
"She was crushed, she was sitting behind the driver," Taryn said. "Not Just her leg, though, because she also had cervical spine, her neck was broken. So they did a surgery there for her femur, her arm, and then both of her legs."
The accident happened two weeks before their blended family vacation to Cancun, but when Taryn tried to cancel she ran into trouble.
"They were able to cancel the hotel and refund that, and they said, we can't cancel the flights because you didn't buy the insurance," she said.
Despite explaining her daughter's injuries, the airline wrote: The refund request "Doesn't' fit into one of our eligible refund options." It would only issue a credit voucher that had to be used by May 1.
"I was thinking, OK, May 1, yeah, we could do that. And then it just kept being setback after setback, more surgeries, infection, and then I was like, there's no way we're going to get there for May 1. And even the doctors, they were like, not going to be ready," Taryn said.
She appealed for an extension of the flight credits online, but their refund was grounded.
There were 10 tickets purchased for between $6,000 and $7,000.
"It's a lot of money, and it's just sitting on a credit card. It's not like we have the money to pay for it, so it's just gaining interest," she said.
While at her daughter's hospital bedside, Taryn hit the alarm for 7 On Your Side and we went to work right away.
"I started getting phone calls and emails saying that they were going to refund me," she said.
A full refund of airfare and fees, $6,022, will be put toward a new family trip when Cadence is able to travel.
"You guys are amazing. Wow, so grateful. I think it's amazing what you do, really," Taryn said.
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