By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Something woke Patti Fox at midnight.
She looked at her phone screen and saw missed calls going back to 10:15 p.m. A friend of Carissa’s had called over and over from Chicago. He’d been tracking her on a location app and saw that she’d been moved to a hospital.
Fox started calling hospitals in Aurora. Getting anyone to tell her anything was its own fight. Carissa didn’t have her driver’s license on her that night and had been checked in as a Jane Doe. When Fox finally located her at HCA Health One, the message from staff was short.
“They said, ‘get here,’” Fox told RMV.
With two kids in tow and her husband Daniel beside her, Fox drove an hour and a half south in the dark. “The whole time I was just praying out to God to please save her,” she said. “Please not tonight. Please don’t take her.”
On their way, the doctor called. They needed to get there soon.
“I knew what that meant,” Fox said. “I didn’t know that somebody could survive that kind of pain because it just hurt to breathe. There’s no description that is adequate for the pain that I felt. And the fear.”
The night that changed everything
Carissa Aspnes had just turned 22. She’d spent time in Chicago chasing her skincare dreams before moving back to Colorado in February 2025. She enrolled in esthetician school and wanted to start her own skincare line because she believed quality skincare shouldn’t be out of reach for people who couldn’t afford it. “She had big, big ambitions,” Fox said.
Carissa was heading out with friends to celebrate her birthday and what she called her summer of fun on March 28. In a text sent that evening she proclaimed, “Now that I’ve been holding my arms open to what life has to offer me I couldn’t be happier.”
A screenshot of texts Carissa sent the evening of March 28, 2025, hours before the crash. Courtesy of the Aspnes family via GoFundMe.
Carissa hopped on the back of a friend’s motorcycle for a quick ride to enjoy the night before they headed to Blackhawk.
As they rode down Parker Road, Valeria De Los Angeles Bermudez Marcano of Venezuela ran a stop sign, crossed three lanes of traffic and hit them.
According to Fox, Marcano and the others in her car fled the scene, leaving Carissa and the motorcycle’s driver unconscious on the side of the road. Bystanders arrived as they were fleeing and called 911.
At the hospital
When Fox arrived at HCA Health One, Carissa’s father Carl and Fox’s parents were there. Doctors said emergency surgery was necessary.
They were given 30 seconds with her before she was wheeled in.
“I couldn’t recognize my baby’s face,” Fox said. “She was just bloody and bruised and swollen. And I couldn’t even recognize her…I just touched her hand. And I told her that mommy and daddy were there. And that we love her very much. And that Jesus was with her.”
The brain swelling had pushed down onto her brain stem. Surgeons removed a large portion of her skull to give it room to swell without further damage. The next five days would be critical.
Fox sat with her in the ICU and watched the ventilator monitor. The machine marked Carissa’s own breaths with small pink triangles. “I just remember watching those machines for hours,” she said. “First it started with just a couple of pink triangles here and there and then we saw more and more.”
Then a nurse touched Carissa’s feet and she jerked her foot back.
“She’s always been super ticklish,” Fox said. “And when she jerked her foot back I was like, there’s my girl. She’s still there.”
What life looks like now
Carissa was transferred to Craig Rehabilitation Hospital then came home in October. She is minimally conscious, nonverbal, wheelchair-bound and fed through a G-tube. Most of her movement is reflexive.
“It’s hard to explain what that means,” Fox said. “If I tell her to squeeze my hand she’s more than likely not going to do it. She doesn’t have a whole lot of volitional control over her body. Much of her movement is reflexive or involuntary. But that’s increasing, painfully, little by little.”
Their days with medications and breakfast through the G-tube. Then Fox does Carissa’s skincare regimen. “She was such a diva when it came to her skincare,” Fox said. “And boy, she will never forgive me if I don’t maintain it.”
A Hoyer lift gets her from bed to wheelchair. From there, physical therapy, including an FES bike that uses electrodes on her legs to force the muscles to fire in hopes of rebuilding neural pathways. Insurance cut off physical therapy coverage on the grounds she wasn’t progressing fast enough. Fox pays for it out of pocket.
On May 26, Carissa’s step-father, Daniel, shared on X that her primary insurance provider is now denying her nursing care as well. The denial came with no notice. They are “scrambling to figure out what to do,” Daniel said.
Between therapy, equipment, medications and daily care needs, they have been spending about $3,000 to $4,000 dollars out of pocket every month before the most recent insurance denial.
“She will never not be dependent,” Fox said. “Regardless of her healing journey, how quickly or slowly it progresses.”
The arrest and court
Marcano turned herself in on March 29, 2025. A rapid arraignment was held Monday morning. According to Fox, neither the victim’s advocate nor the district attorney had been notified it was happening. Bond was set at $500. The court determined she was not a flight risk.
A few days after Marcano’s release, an investigating detective called Fox. He mentioned a language barrier in the investigation. Fox asked about immigration status. “He kind of paused and almost seemed surprised,” she said. “And he was like, oh, they’re citizens, they’re all citizens. And I thought, they’re citizens but they don’t speak English?”
Carissa was still critical. Fox didn’t have the bandwidth to pursue it and filed it away.
When she eventually reviewed the heavily redacted police report obtained through a third-party website by her ex-father-in-law, there were visa numbers in it. “I was like, that’s weird,” Fox said. “Why would a citizen have a visa?”
Fox was told to expect six continuances, and Marcano’s defense would likely use all of them. Then came a seventh. The public defender needed time to determine how a plea deal would affect Marcano’s immigration status.
“This woman got to spend her holidays with her loved ones while Carissa — we don’t even know if she knew it was Christmas. Where’s Carissa’s break? Where’s her continuance?”
For the seventh arraignment, Fox brought Carissa to the courthouse. Prosecutors and public defenders had been handling the case as paperwork, as a name on a file. Fox wanted them to see what that name looked like now. The public defender saw Carissa in her wheelchair and turned to Fox’s father and asked, “Is that?” Her father said “yes.” A flurry of conversations followed.
Marcano took the plea.
The original charges were reduced to a single Class 5 felony — conspiracy to flee the scene of an accident causing severe bodily injury — and restitution of $15,000. The charge carried a maximum of three years in prison.
“Three years for effectively taking somebody’s life,” Fox said. “Carissa didn’t die, but she’s not really here either.”
The restitution in the plea was designated for the motorcycle’s driver. “We were not a part of any restitution,” Fox said. “Which I find offensive. No mention of us, no mention of her specifically.”
Rather than wait on a sentencing that could end in probation, Fox filed a report with the VOICE Office, the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement program, reopened under President Trump after being shuttered by the Biden administration. She told them what was happening, where to find Marcano and the timeline. ICE picked her up and deported her on March 2, per ICE Denver via CBS Colorado.
“I was so thankful that they came and got her when they did,” Fox said. “She could still be walking around and living her life in Colorado and pursuing her American dream when Carissa’s American dream was stolen from her. That’s offensive.”
“A life for a life”
“The only way to get justice is to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families,” Fox said. “That’s my version of a life for a life. If we can spare one family of this, then it’s okay.”
On April 16, 2026 she testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight alongside other angel families. She has spoken with victim advocates as well as legislators at the state and federal levels for better legislation for victims. She has been vocal about the toll illegal immigration takes on families.
Fox will speak at the RMV Freedom Fest on June 26 at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock.
“We cannot afford to remain complacent,” she said. “These next couple years of elections will set the foundations of the rest of our country moving forward. We’re at a very precarious point where the United States could very quickly become unrecognizable. And it will no longer be the amazing country that my father fought for.”
Every morning she does Carissa’s skincare. Gets her up with the crane. Counts the small victories.
“She is such a strong, strong young lady,” Fox said. “This child had her own mind from the get go…She is stubborn. And she still is… She is healing as hard as she can and as fast as she can. And she is not giving up.”
To support Carissa’s ongoing care, donations are accepted through: gofundme.com/f/support-for-all-the-current-unknowns
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