Gianna Calhoun was riding an e-scooter with her 10-year-old sister Aubrey in their Strongsville neighborhood on June 19 when the scooter hit a pothole and threw her into the street. The 12-year-old suffered a traumatic brain injury, was placed in an induced coma, and spent weeks relearning how to speak and move before she returned this month to thank the firefighters who helped save her life.
Gianna had given her own helmet to a younger friend who was riding on the back of her scooter that day, according to WKYC. After the crash, Aubrey ran to a nearby house for help, and a neighbor called 911. Gianna’s father, Cody Calhoun, found her unconscious in the street, and her mother, Marissa Calhoun, was driving home from a shopping trip in North Olmsted when a neighbor reached her with the news.
Strongsville paramedics arrived about three or four minutes after Cody reached the scene. Because Gianna was struggling to breathe and seizing, paramedics took her to Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights rather than MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where the city says high-risk trauma patients are normally taken. She was then transferred by helicopter to UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, where a neurosurgeon removed part of her skull to relieve brain swelling. Cody said the surgery saved his daughter’s life, and that firefighters later told him they were surprised she survived.
A Long Road Through Rehab
Gianna spent about a week in intensive care and four days in an induced coma, per the city of Strongsville. She then spent seven weeks in rehabilitation at Cleveland Clinic Children’s, the station reports, before continuing outpatient therapy five days a week. She had part of her skull replaced earlier this month, and she now has expressive aphasia — though she can form sentences when prompted, read, and has retained her long-term memory.
She is also working on fine motor skills in her right hand, but according to the station’s report, she is walking normally again and has even gotten back to golfing with her father. Cody said the family is hopeful Gianna will make a full recovery, and she plans to start at Strongsville Middle School alongside her sixth-grade classmates in January, per the city of Strongsville.
Thanking the Firefighters Who Showed Up
On October 20, Gianna visited Strongsville Fire Station 2 on Howe Road to thank the firefighters and paramedics who responded the day of her crash. The family has also leaned on a wider circle of support — Cody said neighbors, Gianna’s school and the High Point swim team all rallied around them, and the swim team organized a welcome-home parade outside the Calhouns’ house that Cody estimated drew 50 or 60 cars full of children.
Marissa said first responders make life-and-death decisions as part of their jobs every day, a reality her family came to understand firsthand. Cody, for his part, said he believes e-scooter riders should face an age requirement, noting that some of the family’s scooters can reach 14 mph and that riders are often told to use streets because sidewalks are too bumpy. He advised other families to avoid e-scooters if possible and to make sure riders wear helmets, while Marissa said simply that Gianna should wear a helmet when riding. Cody added that families going through a similar ordeal should be patient and count the small wins each day.
Part of a Bigger Spike in Injuries
Gianna’s crash comes amid what regional hospitals describe as a sharp rise in pediatric e-bike and e-scooter injuries. At MetroHealth System, physicians treated 43 e-bike-related injuries during June, July and the first part of August, up nearly 50 percent from the 29 cases recorded over the same stretch in 2025, according to cleveland.com. Rainbow Babies estimated it treated nearly 30 e-bike injuries among kids ages 9 to 16 across that same summer period, and Akron Children’s said it had already surpassed its entire 2025 total of e-bike and e-scooter injuries by mid-July.
A nationwide analysis found a similar trend. Researchers at Truveta identified 12,485 e-bike and e-scooter injury-related emergency-department visits between January 2023 and May 2026, with head and neck injuries showing up in 35.4 percent of those visits and traumatic brain injuries diagnosed in 6.9 percent of visits among children and adolescents, the firm reported. The rate of such ED visits among kids and teens under 18 climbed 7.5-fold between 2023 and May 2026, and jumped 155.2 percent just between the January-to-May periods of 2025 and 2026.
Other Ohio hospitals have reported similarly steep increases. Dayton Children’s treated 137 children for e-bike and e-scooter-related injuries between May and July this year, including 16 involving cars or other vehicles. The hospital said 22 children with e-bike or e-scooter injuries had been admitted so far in 2026, compared with nine for all of 2025. The American College of Surgeons has said more than 20,000 Americans are injured on electric bicycles annually, with roughly 3,000 requiring hospitalization, per cleveland.com’s report.
Similar crashes have played out elsewhere in recent months. In Pennsylvania, 12-year-old Ross Funk suffered a traumatic brain injury in an e-scooter accident near Elizabethtown on September 18 after looking down at a dropped phone and losing control, according to local21news.com. He was thrown over the handlebars into the road, placed on a ventilator, and remained in a medically induced coma for three weeks. In Orange County, California, e-bike injuries surpassed falls and motor-vehicle collisions in 2025 to become the leading cause of pediatric emergency trauma visits at Rady Children’s Health, NPR reported, with one trauma surgeon telling the outlet that severe e-bike injuries can resemble motorcycle-crash injuries rather than bicycle-crash injuries because the devices are heavier and faster.
