GARBER—Rudi Kroll isn’t letting a traumatic brain injury (TBI) get in the way of her chasing her dreams.
The Garber High School senior graduated with honors on May 12 and is headed to Stillwater in June to live, work with cattle, and attend Oklahoma State University as a sophomore and major in ag communications.
Her mother Toni Kroll, who owns Garber’s downtown café Wick’s, is immensely proud of her middle daughter.
Last May, Toni had received the call no parent should ever receive — Rudi had been in a car accident in the early morning hours that fateful Friday in Oklahoma City with her friends and was in critical condition.
Rudi had been in the backseat of a car being driven by college student Katelyn Callahan, whose fiancé Tristen Cherry (in the front passenger seat) is the brother of Rudi’s best friend Jayli Diel (who was in the backseat with Rudi). The four of them had been in Stillwater for the annual Calf Fry the previous evening enjoying the first night of the three-day outdoor red dirt country music festival at the Tumbleweed.
Only five minutes from Cherry’s house in Oklahoma City, they were hit head-on by a drunken driver going the wrong way on the westbound lane of I-44.
Callahan, who had been set to marry Cherry at the end of the month, was killed and the other three were critically injured. The drunken driver with an expired driver’s license, Sergio Ibarra of Norman, and his passenger, Alex Alvarado of Chicago, had minor injuries.
Rudi and Jayli, who were juniors at Garber High School, both had Life360 on their smartphones — a safety tracker app that thousands of parents use to locate their children’s whereabouts — and Diel’s parents had enabled the crash alert texts on their smartphones whereas Kroll’s parents had not. The Diels immediately called and woke up Toni around 2 a.m. to let her know the girls had been an accident.
“We knew one was dead, but we just didn’t know who,” Toni recalled. Sadly, she said, Oklahoma Highway Patrol identified Callahan by her engagement ring.
The parents desperately waited for word at the hospitals — Rudi and Cherry were at Integris while Diel was at OU Medical.
Toni never left Rudi’s side for 55 days, and Wick’s remained closed during that time.
Struggling to survive
Rudi’s pelvis was shattered into seven pieces, both of her lungs collapsed and she had multiple broken ribs along with lacerations to her bladder, kidney and spleen. It turned her jaw was broken, too, but it wasn’t caught by her mother’s attentiveness to dental detail until later because Rudi had been unconscious and on a ventilator. In addition, Rudi had a severe TBI and didn’t speak for three weeks.
At the end of June, after two weeks in ICU and then six weeks at Bethany Children’s Health Center for rehabilitation, Rudi finally got to go home to Garber. When she was released from Bethany, she mentally tested at a second-grade level.
It was an adjustment for everyone as she worked to regain her ability to walk and talk and do things she’d always done. Her mom took her to occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, multiple doctor’s appointments and more in the month of July.
After everything with Rudi’s care leveled out, Toni felt she could finally go back to work. She reopened Wick’s the Monday before the 2025-26 school year began for Garber Public Schools, and Rudi began her senior year, including cheering at football games ,like she had before and driving. She resumed participating in FFA, too.
“She’d rather be with cattle than people,” Toni said with a laugh.
That was one of the things that didn’t change after the accident; many other things did as a result of the TBI, but Toni declined to share the particulars aside from saying her daughter is the same and yet she’s not.
Last September, Rudi wrote an essay detailing her traumatic experience and was accepted into OSU. She posted herself reading that essay on a TikTok video, which caught the attention of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter in Tulsa, so she also spoke at MADD’s fall gala, too.
Rudi was subpoenaed in December for Ibarra’s appearance in the Oklahoma County District Court.
At that time, Toni pressed the assistant district attorney about details surrounding the accident; she had been unable to get a direct answer despite repeatedly calling the victim advocate in the DA’s office and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
“My gut told me there was more to it” than anyone was saying or admitting to, Toni said. And she was correct.
Yes, Ibarra was at fault because he had been driving on an expired driver’s license impaired with a 0.14 blood alcohol level, as well as ketamine and cocaine in his system going the wrong way on the interstate.
However, the ADA finally revealed Callahan also had been impaired at the time with a 0.11 blood alcohol level since she and Cherry had both been drinking during and after the music festival, thus affecting her ability to react behind the wheel.
Moving on
Nevertheless, Rudi is ready to leave the past 12 months behind and move forward into the next phase of her life as a young adult with college and her boyfriend.
She was recalled by the Oklahoma County court a month before her graduation to witness Ibarra’s sentencing. He had accepted responsibility for his part in the accident in March with a plea agreement meaning there would be no trial and Rudi wouldn’t have to testify.
Ibarra was sentenced to life in prison for one count of first-degree negligent homicide and 20 years each for three counts of great bodily harm to be served concurrently. He turned 30 years old while in jail last summer.
Toni said he expressed remorse in April for his part in the accident that changed all their lives forever, both he and his family weeping in court, and she openly forgave him during her victim statement stating, “not because what happened was acceptable, but because holding onto anger will not help my daughter heal.”
During her own victim statement, Rudi also accepted responsibility for getting into the car even though she knew Callahan had been drinking.
The decisions made that early morning by all involved last May resulted in devastating and life-altering consequences that cost one woman her life and divisively fractured the spirits of three more.
Rudi endured an incredibly long and painful recovery, full of uncertainty, fear and exhaustion, yet she kept going because of you, Toni wrote in a letter to the Oklahoma City Fire Department that responded to the accident along with invites to Rudi’s graduation.
Two of those firefighters — who before May 2, 2025, had no idea who Rudi was but attentively treated her as if they did — showed up in Garber a year and 10 days later to cheer her on from the stands.
Sitting with them were the hospital chaplain “who had been with us from the get-go, meeting us in the ER and sitting with us,” Toni said, as well as two of the ICU nurses who cared for Rudi while she was critically injured and non-verbal.
“She has a bond with these people even though she has no memory of them. She doesn’t remember being in the ICU,” Toni said.
Every time Toni goes to Oklahoma City, she bakes cookies or cinnamon rolls and delivers them to the firehouse for the green shift firefighters and to the hospital for the trauma unit nurses and physician’s assistant.
“They saved her life,” she said, so as a mother, she will never stop recognizing that.