Saturday’s fatal accident leaves injuries, man apologizes for brother

A man is seriously injured and undergoing multiple surgeries in a Phoenix hospital after an accident on Highway 95 north of Parker that also killed another driver and seriously injured a passenger.

Rocky and Maria Rhodes, a retired couple who have lived in Lake Havasu City for well over a decade, were involved in the head-on collision, according to their son Mario.

They were heading northbound on Saturday night in their Toyota when a Hyundai vehicle driven by Andrew Snook, 61, moved into their lane near River Island State Park and hit them head-on. Snook died at the scene. The Rhodes’ car rolled five times, according to Mario’s girlfriend Luwana writing on GoFundMe, and Rocky was “either ejected or may have crawled out of the car.”

They were flown to hospital in Phoenix, where Rocky was admitted to the ICU in serious condition and is now undergoing the first of many surgeries, with the expectation that he will be in recovery for many months.

“My mom fared the best,” Mario told Parker Live. “But my dad’s in pretty serious condition, and they had a friend in the car with them who’s in serious condition too.”

Mario said his father has internal bleeding, which caused surgery to be postponed from yesterday to today.

“Today they’re going to address the surgery that they wanted to do on his back, he also has a shattered ankle, broken ribs, punctured lung, possibly some other things too. He’s sedated right now so he hasn’t been awake, they say he’s going to be at least two more weeks in ICU.”

Rocky and Maria Rhodes

The couple, who have been married for almost 50 years, has had water damage in their house that they had been trying to address, living in a local hotel for the past two weeks while they oversaw work on the house. Mario is now trying to coordinate that activity so that his mother will have a place to move back into.

“They’re a great couple,” he said. “Loved by a lot of people, they have a very active social life and this is hitting everybody pretty hard. They love motorcycles and being in Havasu. They’re very happy. There’ll be a lot of logistics while we try to figure out how to handle accommodations in Phoenix and travel and that sort of thing.”

Meanwhile, the family of the driver who died in the accident are reacting to the news with sadness. Andrew’s brother Michael, speaking to Parker Live while in town to settle some of his brother’s affairs, said he feels terribly about what happened.

“On behalf of the family, we want to apologize to the innocent people that my brother hurt,” he said. “Nobody deserves what happened and we feel very ashamed. We care about everybody. We’ll miss our brother but innocent people were hurt and it’s terrible.”

Michael said that Andrew was a military veteran who moved out to the river from Southern California after years of visiting with the family since they were young.

Mario said he too felt bad about the loss of life.

“It’s very unfortunate that the other driver perished in this,” he said.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety is handling the investigation.

A GoFundMe page to benefit the Rhodes set up by Luwana can be found HERE.