Mehki Baxter came to Denver from the East Coast to celebrate turning 20. Instead, he ended up at Denver Health with part of his skull removed after a rented scooter threw him onto the pavement near 17th Avenue and Broadway, according to his family. Passers-by rushed to revive him at the scene on September 1, and his parents are now asking the public for help covering the cost of staying in Colorado while he recovers.
According to FOX31 Denver, Baxter had rented a scooter to tour downtown when its brakes malfunctioned near the intersection, sending him into the path of a car. His father, Duane Baxter, told the station his son landed 20 feet from the crash and hit his head hard on the pavement. “He had angels around him that day,” Duane Baxter said, according to the station's report.
Doctors temporarily removed a portion of Mehki Baxter's skull because of excessive swelling, the station reported, and his family says his recovery could take months. A GoFundMe campaign launched around September 5 cites housing, lost income, and medical recovery costs, according to the fundraiser page.
A Mother's Financial Strain Far From Home
The fundraiser notes housing, lost income, and medical recovery costs, deepening the financial pressure as the family's stay drags on.
Duane Baxter told the station his son was pursuing a career as an air traffic controller and that the family believes he will still get there one day. The trip to Colorado had been meant as a birthday celebration before that path began.
Part of a Broader Pattern on Denver's Streets
Baxter's crash was not the only scooter incident reported in Denver on September 1. A separate scooter rider suffered serious injuries after colliding with a vehicle at 17th Avenue and Franklin Street in Denver's Uptown neighborhood on the same September 1, according to Hoodline's earlier report on that collision.
Head trauma cases like Baxter's are consistent with what researchers have documented citywide. A University of Colorado School of Medicine study published in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research examined 2,424 patients treated for e-scooter injuries at Denver Health between January 2020 and November 2023, finding that 12% required hospital admission and that median hospital charges reached $7,075 per patient, per the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Between 2021 and 2022, Denver Health emergency physicians treated an average of 3.6 e-scooter injury patients per day, accumulating more than $10.4 million in hospital charges over four years, according to The Colorado Sun.
Deaths Rose Sharply Even as the City Tightened Rules
Denver recorded eight standing e-scooter rider deaths in 2025, quadrupling its previous annual record, with seven of those fatalities resulting from collisions between scooter riders and motor vehicles, Hoodline has reported. The city responded earlier in 2026 by overhauling its micromobility program, replacing Lime and Bird with exclusive vendor Veo and introducing mandatory pre-ride safety quizzes along with sidewalk-detection technology, according to the Denver Gazette.
Those safeguards haven't eliminated risky riding. During Veo's first quarterly reporting period in Denver, from May through June 2026, riders logged more than 338,000 sidewalk rides across 1.34 million total trips, Hoodline's review of the city's data showed. Colorado law also leaves a gap for adult riders: helmet use is not mandated for adult scooter riders, according to the Colorado General Assembly, meaning visitors like Baxter face no legal requirement to wear one.
It remains unclear which rental vendor operated the scooter Baxter rode, whether officials have inspected the vehicle over the reported brake failure, or whether any traffic charges are pending against the driver involved, based on available reporting. For now, Baxter's parents are focused on keeping him in Denver long enough to heal, hoping the public support raised through GoFundMe can bridge the gap left by lost income.
