Lynsea Rohde was born in the backseat of a Chevy Blazer on the side of a Texas road on Nov. 28, 1993. Thirty-two years later, on Sept. 20, 2025, that life was almost snuffed out on the streets of Charlotte, derailed by a reckless driver believed to be impaired at the time of the incident.
Lynsea was leaving the NoDa neighborhood where she lives, pulling from East 36th Street onto North Tryon Street on her way to the airport to drop off her sister, Chelsea, who had been visiting from Austin, Texas. The driver ran the red light, slamming into the side of her car.
Investigators believe Chelsea’s head bounced off the passenger side airbag and back toward the center of the car, where the back of her head collided with the right side of Lynsea’s skull, shattering it.
While Lynsea doesn’t remember anything that came directly after that — or 12 hours before — what did follow involved two major surgeries and a weeklong induced coma. Her memory picks back up about three weeks after the accident, still in the hospital without part of her skull.
She was discharged on Oct. 16, ordered to wear a helmet until she could undergo another surgery to replace the missing piece of her skull, which would take place on Dec. 4.
For Lynsea, who had become one of Charlotte’s most promising new pop artists in the years leading up to the wreck, the future remained unclear. Doctors worried she may not remember close friends or family members. Other question marks pocked her road to recovery before she could even consider making music again.
Her mother and stepdad, who had caught the first flight to Charlotte upon learning of the wreck, considered moving her back to Texas where they lived. Doctors had told them she may need to be under supervised care for a year or longer. They contemplated moving closer to renowned brain centers in Houston or Atlanta.
Yet after weeks of witnessing the outpouring of support from community members in Charlotte, they decided to keep her here, moving into her apartment to oversee her recovery after the discharge. What has followed has been nothing short of a miraculous recovery, as Lynsea’s parents have returned to Texas and she has returned to living something close to the life she lived before the wreck.
She recently passed a driving test that most victims of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) must take in order to re-qualify for a drivers license. She’s back at work now at Mood House and Toccare, two sister spa businesses in Dilworth, and has even returned to the studio to begin working on new music.
Her sister has also recovered, returning to Austin to be with her family after receiving treatment for a severe concussion.
On Sunday, March 22, Lynsea will mark the six-month anniversary of the wreck with a performance at Petra’s.
Billed as “an intimate night of music and storytelling,” Lynsea will perform songs like “last call,” her single from summer 2025, and “Torn,” a cover of Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 single that Lynsea recorded before the wreck and released during her recovery in November.
She’ll also retell some of the stories from her recovery, updating her “medical team,” which is how she refers to the hundreds of people who supported her from afar while she was in the hospital and afterwards, raising more than $60,000 to put toward her medical bills but also providing the inspiration to keep going.
“There were a few times where I just came to terms with giving up [on music] and just being like, ‘It’s okay, I can do other things with my life,’” she told Queen City Nerve in her first full-length interview since the wreck. “Then, given my pretty natural determination and a really supportive community that encouraged me to not do that, I just kept trying.”
A journal full of squiggles
In the weeks directly following the wreck, a time that Lynsea considers herself fortunate not to remember, her family provided her with a journal to see if she could communicate with them through writing.
She began by scrawling squiggles on the paper, which was upsetting for her family at first. However, the journal over time turned into a symbol of growth, as day by day they watched her writing improve.
“They were really worried about my writing,” Lynsea explained. “And then slowly, they got to see my brain kind of wake up because the squiggles turned into, like, really messy handwriting. And just over day after day, it would clear up. And eventually I was able to just write to communicate.”
Other occurrences during this time helped save her music career. Lynsea’s closest friend, Kylee Brooks, is an emergency medicine physician in Charlotte, which means a large circle of Lynsea’s mutual friends are also in emergency medicine.
When Lynsea was wheeled into the emergency room with her head fully wrapped after the wreck, a friend recognized the tattoo she had just gotten with Brooks, which helped them ID her and contact her family.
As an ER doctor, Brooks was present throughout Lynsea’s recovery, pushing back on another doctor’s order to tracheostomize Lynsea at one point, which could have forever impacted her ability to sing.
“She really prioritized the doctors in the ICU understanding that we have to try again for the breathing tube,” Lynsea explained. “She had the knowledge of, like, ‘We can try again. It will be difficult, but we can try the breathing tube again,’ whereas my parents didn’t know. If the doctor says trach, they say yes. So I’m really grateful for [Brooks] being there.”
After leaving the hospital, Lynsea went through what she calls her “helmet phase,” using a walker to get around and wearing a helmet to protect the part of her head where her skull was no longer there.
Within two months of her discharge from the hospital, she had graduated out of speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy. She did, however, learn that she needed her skull fully intact to properly sing.
“In that phase without the skull piece, I couldn’t recognize pitch,” she recalled. “Someone would play a note and I’d try to just pitch-match it, and I’d be like, ‘That’s right? Is that good?’ and they’d be like, ‘No, not even close.’ So, I couldn’t do it, and I don’t know why. But then as soon as I woke up from the surgery where they put the piece [of skull] in, I was not fine, but I was like, more myself and the pitch recognition came really quickly after that.”
While she hasn’t had any issues with losing long-term memory from before the wreck or short-term memory after it, as was a concern in the early days of her recovery process, she has had some trouble remembering how her old songs go, she said.
“I thought, now that I’ve conquered the pitch recognition, I figured everything else would come naturally, but now my rhythm is just off,” she said. “I mean, I wrote the songs, you’d think I’d remember how they go, and I remember the notes and kind of hear them in my head, but I’ll sing them with the wrong rhythm. So I have to kind of relearn my own songs — listen to my demos and my voice memos to relearn.”
Read more: Lynsea Explores Personal Health Journey with New Single, ‘hormones’ (2024)
Perhaps the most inexplicable result of the accident, at least to a layman without knowledge of how TBIs work, was that Lynsea lost the ability to express her emotions. While emotional dysregulation is a common result of a TBI, that often manifests through seemingly irrational mood swings, crying or laughing at a time when such expressions seem out of place.
For Lynsea, however, it became impossible to express the emotions she was rightfully feeling. She was unable to cry for months following the wreck, an experience she said was the most miserable part of her recovery.
“It felt like I had a stomachache,” she said. “I would sit for hours on my bed and I’d just like, ugh, like try to squeeze it out.”
It wasn’t until January, when her parents left her apartment to go back to Texas, that she became overwhelmed in the most welcoming way.
“When I shut the door behind me to say bye to them and I was alone for the first time in four months, it just came over me,” she recalled. “I saw a picture that I had taken of them drinking their coffee one morning that I woke up after the hospital, and [the tears] just, like, came over me.”
She said she’s now able to regularly tear up and even get in a proper cry here and there. She expects the Petra’s show will bring on more of those welcome tears.
“I hope there will be tears. I celebrate tears now,” she said. “After not being able to, anytime someone’s crying and they apologize for crying, I’m like, ‘Never apologize!’”
A return to songwriting and an intro to advocacy
Any fan of Lynsea’s music knows that emotions are at the core of nearly any song she writes. Tracks like her debut, “Coffee @ Midnight,” and her latest single “last call” carry similar themes revolving around human connection, be it romantic or platonic.
Her next single, “Felt Like Love,” continues down that road, addressing her own struggle to find and define love at a time when she’s not only dealing with a life-changing medical recovery but going through a divorce, a process that began in January 2025.
Having grown up in an evangelist family, she moved to Charlotte to head Elevation Church’s music label, Elevation Worship Records. The Berklee College of Music grad has since left the church, however, and says she’s “extremely spiritual, but not in an organized religion kind of way.”
She describes her faith as being rooted in human connection, moments like the ones captured in the aforementioned tracks.
“I think that I’m starting to learn more and more that there’s more to love than just love, and there’s a lot of relationship, friendship and partnership that’s needed,” she said. “That’s why my next single is called ‘Felt Like Love.’ … It’s like I crave these moments with all people that are intimate. It doesn’t mean that it’s the romantic kind of love that people look for, but it is like love. It’s this connection. I’ve always craved connection.”
Lynsea’s recent experience has also inspired in her a desire to fight for safer standards on the road. Since the wreck, she’s learned about the existence of far-side airbags, which deploy from the center console to prevent front passengers from colliding with each other during side-impact crashes.
Read more: Lynsea Unlocks Memories with HitClips-Inspired Rollout for ‘last call’ (2025)
Introduced in 2013, the far-side airbag is only available in 10 car models in the United States, according to the International Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS). While searching for her own new car, Lynsea has learned first-hand just how rare it is to find an affordable model with one equipped.
Far-side airbags are not federally mandated due to the relative rarity of drivers colliding heads with passengers, Lynsea has been told. She’s now working with Atrium Health’s research teams with plans to advocate to the federal government for stricter requirements regarding that specific airbag.
She said she’s also planning to lobby the IIHS to consider the presence of far-side airbags when naming its annual Top Safety Picks, which are then used in marketing the cars that are selected as such.
Lynsea appeared at a bond hearing for the man who crashed into her. He faces charges of causing serious injury by vehicle, reckless driving, failing to stop at a red light, possession of marijuana, possession of a stolen vehicle, breaking and entering into a vehicle, and larceny of a motor vehicle.
Wearing a helmet and using a walker to get into the courtroom, Lynsea was able to look the man in the eyes as he apologized to her.
“I just shared that I was wearing my seatbelt, I was stopped at a red light, I did everything I was taught to do that would keep me safe, and this still happened,” she said of the hearing.
Investigators believe the man was high not only on marijuana but crystal meth at the time of the wreck, according to Lynsea. Having lost her own father to a drug overdose at age 19, she has empathy for the man who upturned her life.
“He is already so lucky that this happened to someone who doesn’t hate him, who is full of compassion and wants his recovery, who is full of forgiveness,” she said. “He doesn’t need to get luckier … I have a different, very intimate connection with addicts in recovery and a grace for them.”
At the time of this writing, the man is still being held on $450,000 bond.
Lynsea has been thinking about the trauma she went through as a teen recently after coming across some songs she wrote about losing her father at that time.
“There are a few songs I wrote around that time about how to hold those memories but also move on from them, and how do I move on?” she said. “I’ve found them again in my current recovery, and the way they were written and the emotion I think that I wrote them out of is so similar to what I feel now. I’m working on finishing those now because grief, I mean, it’s a different type of grief, but it’s essentially all grief.”
Lynsea calls her upcoming show at Petra’s “the beginning of a new chapter” in her life, but it’s the events in the book that have brought her here and will continue to drive her forward into the future.
Outstanding writing. Not only does it cover the details of a tragic story, it helps the reader develop empathy for the artist we almost lost and the brave journey that she is still completing.
Thank you for sharing your talent with readers.