'We're not done yet'

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

Ellen Brown remembers the elation of being with her daughter that day last summer as the couple headed to an event in Coeur d’Alene, one they had planned to attend for a while.

Brown, 57, and her daughter, Joelle Tanguay, 34 who had traveled from her home on the Washington coast to spend time with her mom, were headed to Sanders Beach to an annual lunar event called Soul Shine.

The sunlight that afternoon was powdery and golden. The traffic was moderate.

“I remember it as a nice day,” Brown recalls.

The curtain, though, would quickly be drawn on her memory, and anything she tries to recall from that summer Thursday is clipped, like film that has been spliced and then taped back together.

Brown doesn’t remember the collision that sent her and Tanguay to the hospital, where her daughter remains eight months later.

She doesn’t remember the air-splitting noise caused by a blue Toyota pickup truck smashing into the rear passenger side of the women’s Subaru Outback that was headed east on Interstate 90 from Post Falls.

She doesn’t remember careening into a construction site, slamming into a pole that kept the Subaru from shooting into the westbound lane.

She doesn’t remember her daughter being crushed by the impact.

She recalls seeing photographs taken by police, passersby and firefighters of the crash afterward, but they are all she has to piece together events.

“I don’t remember getting hit,” Brown said. “All I can go off is the pictures, and what people have told me.”

That’s sort of a blessing.

“I heard it was horrific,” she said.

When Ian Bolstad, 24 — the driver of the pickup truck who crashed into the women’s car July 27 after wildly speeding east on the interstate — is sentenced Monday in Coeur d’Alene for one count of aggravated DUI, a charge that carries a 15-year prison sentence, Brown will be there.

Her daughter, who suffered traumatic injuries that resulted in a hole in her spinal cord that leaks fluid, and who is relearning to walk as she breathes through a tracheal tube, will not attend because she is in a Seattle care facility.

It is the ninth hospital in four states that Tanguay has been in since the July 29 crash.

Brown, who worked at the Kroc Center at the time of the wreck, said the collision stopped with a hammer blow the futures she and Joelle had envisioned, and worked toward.

Since that day, both their lives have been on a singular track of recovery while Bolstad remains in the Kootenai County jail on a $250,000 bond.

Bolstad, of Newport, Wash., was initially charged with two felony counts of aggravated DUI, but one of the counts was dismissed as part of a plea agreement. If both counts stand and the judge at a Monday sentencing in Coeur d’Alene’s First District Court rejects the agreement and chooses to run sentences consecutively, Bolstad could spend up to 30 years behind bars.

“We’re hoping he gets the full extent of the law,” Brown said. “We’re trying not to get our hopes up. It’s up to the judge.”

Bolstad is accused of driving a blue Toyota pickup erratically and at high speeds east on I-90 from the Spokane Valley, where he was involved in at least one hit-and-run collision. He continued to drive east around 3:30 p.m. with an open bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum in the cab. His driving prompted 11 calls to authorities from motorists, according to Idaho State Police.

After the crash near Northwest Boulevard, Bolstad fought police, requiring troopers to Taze him twice. Although he told officers he was being chased and that he had taken methamphetamine, he refused to perform a field sobriety test.

Troopers said Bolstad’s Toyota pickup rear ended the Subaru Outback, pushing it into a construction zone where the Subaru crashed into a post and a concrete barrier. Both Tanguay, who suffered head and spinal injuries, and Brown, whose leg was severely injured requiring multiple surgeries, had to be extricated from the smashed Subaru that came to rest on top of a concrete barrier. The highway was closed for three hours.

Brown knows her daughter will recover. Tanguay was doing well when she was being treated in an Inglewood, Colo., facility where she was beginning to stand on her own and gaining strength, but an insurance issue resulted in having her daughter transferred to a Seattle nursing facility where she is not getting the therapy she needs, Brown said.

She just wants her daughter to come home to the community that has thrown its support behind both of the women since the crash.

“At this point I want to bring her home,” Brown said.

She would have to make adjustments, in part because Tanguay is confined to a wheelchair. There would be necessary in-home care, and outpatient therapy, but the biggest plus would be the support network that was built since the crash.

“It’s been quite the journey, but we’re not done yet,” Brown said.

Without the local support, the prayers and endless communication from the community, Brown said, the journey would have been unbearable.

“We’re not done yet,” she said. “We would like to complete it in our home town with our community support.”

That’s why getting Tanguay to Coeur d’Alene is so important to Brown.

“If I can only get her back here, we can really start healing,” she said.