More than most people, Joseph Parenti, 46, knows how quickly life can change in an instant—and how hard one has to fight sometimes to get that life back.
A former Howard Beach resident, certified accountant and Queens College graduate now living in West Hempstead, Parenti grew up as one of four siblings, was into lifting weights, and had a somewhat carefree lifestyle, by his own admission.
“It was a pretty normal life,” he said.
That all changed on the night of Dec. 6, 1988—more than 23 years ago this week— when Parenti, then 23, took a fateful turn down 162nd Avenue in Howard Beach in his car after returning a video he had rented.
As reported in TheForum at the time, he was driving westbound on the street in search of gas when, out of nowhere, a Lindenhurst man who had been fleeing the scene where he had stolen an automobile at Liberty Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard in Ozone Park, plowed that same stolen vehicle into the driver’s side of Parenti’s car.
What happened next is something that the Howard Beach native still does not fully remember to this day, although he continues to live with the consequences.
“I don’t remember much of what happened, but I was told that my heart stopped about three times from the time they got me out of the car to the time I arrived at [ Jamaica Hospital],” he said, recalling the accident.
Unconscious and bleeding from his head, Parenti was pinned inside his car before being rescued by New York City firefighters and the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Fire Department & Ambulance Corps, but went into cardiac arrest almost immediately afterwards.
With the use of Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation, volunteers revived him. However, his heart stopped at least three times while on the way to Jamaica Hospital.
The accident left Parenti with a severe head injury that put him in a coma for nearly a month.
The list of injuries he suffered was seemingly never-ending. While fighting off high fevers that made him delirious and deadly infections in several areas of his body, Parenti also suffered paralysis on his left side and damage to his vocal chords and epiglottis— the latter injury causing food he was ingesting through a tube in the hospital to go up into his lungs, nearly drowning him.
His head trauma left him unable to even remember the accident that put him in the hospital.
“I kept asking my brother ‘Why am I here?’ My frontal lobe was hit, so short-term memory was an issue,” Parenti said, though he laughed as he added, “I think I must have asked him about 50 times in a day why I was there and what happened.”
Parenti, who weighed 150 pounds before the accident, also lost 50 pounds during the slow, arduous recovery process where he was transferred between three different hospitals in seven months.
As he recovered, Parenti admitted that he became depressed as a result of the slowness of his recuperation, and wanted to give up several times, often crying himself to sleep at night.
“I kept asking myself, ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this?’” Parenti said.
Yet, just as all seemed hopeless, Parenti said he came to an epiphany—if he wanted to return to life as he knew it, he was going to have to work to get it back. “You just reach a point of ‘I want to get out of here, I need to get out of here, I need to get back,’” he said. “I thought in my mind, ‘What could I change to get out of here quicker?’ That maybe this was a test to see how strong I was.”
With renewed vigor, Parenti threw himself into his rehab process, ignoring the pain as his body rebuilt itself and allowed him to be discharged in the fall of 1989.
Having learned life-altering lessons from the accident, Parenti is documenting his experiences in his first-ever book, tentatively titled The Accident, which is scheduled to be released sometime next fall.
In the book, being published by Oklahoma-based Tate Publishing & Enterprises, LLC, Parenti documents the accident from that fateful night in Dec. 1988 and his long road to recovery.
The idea of writing the book, Parenti said, only came to him this October, when he came across a notebook that he had with him during his recovery time. The notebook was a way to help him keep track of everything that was happening then, since he was forgetting things easily due to his head injury.
“When I found it, I had someone type it up for me, and I thought, ‘Hey, maybe [writing a book on the accident] was a good idea.’” In one story found within the book, Parenti tells about how his older brother, Michael, had to fight to get him placed back into intensive care at one of the hospitals after he was transferred out too early in order to make room for incoming patients.
To get him back into the unit, Parenti said, his brother had to pretend he was a lawyer. “He called up the hospital saying that he was from some law firm and that he was going to sue the place unless I was placed back into intensive care,” he said with a chuckle. “I was back in there in no time.”
In another twist of fate, the accident led him onto another path — the road to love. In 1990, as he continued his rehabilitation exercises in a Queens gym after he was discharged, Parenti met an old friend and future wife, GeneAnn, who was a school teacher. Having never had a serious relationship before, Parenti said he became drawn to her after she brought him an old picture he was trying to find — taken before the accident — of his competing in a local weightlifting competition.
“She was always doing these little things for me,” Parenti said. “That’s who she was. She showed me unconditional love.”
The two soon began dating, and were married in 1992. Unfortunately, their happiness was cut short when, after contracting a rare immunity disease, GeneAnn died in 2000. Her death, Parenti said, was as devastating as when he was struck by that stolen car all those years ago.
“For me, the hardest part was just watching her as it was happening, to see her struggle,” he said.
However, as he grieved, he drew strength from a familiar place that helped him when he was recovering from his automobile accident — friends and family.
“They say that when you’re down, that’s when you know who you can count on,” Parenti said. “I was lucky to have people around me who cared.”
When asked how he was different now as opposed to how he was before his accident, Parenti said he was much more health-conscious, having taken up Hot Yoga to help him recover from his old neck injuries and becoming a vegetarian.
However, one of the biggest changes in the Howard Beach native’s life came from simply learning to be more comfortable with who he is.
“When I was younger, I would sometimes make a lot of jokes, do things to get people’s approval,” he said. “But there’s something about being in the hospital and not be able to do anything, yet people still like you and are coming to see you… it changed my whole perception about who I was. That I’m important even when I’m not telling jokes. They like me even if I can’t be funny. They like me for me, and that was deep for me.”
More information about the book can be found on www.facebook.com, under the web page’s title, ‘The Accident.’
By Jean-Paul Salamanca
This was the scene at 162nd Avenue in Howard Beach on Dec. 6, 1988, when Joseph Parenti was pried from this vehicle after being hit by an escaping car thief. Parenti suffered multiple injuries, including head trauma, as a result of this accident which he documents in his first book, The Accident, due for release next fall.
