April 23 was any other day for Natalie Sciotti.
She was heading home from her administrative role in the Cumberland Valley School District, preparing to pick her 13-year-old daughter up for softball, then come home and make dinner for them and her 16-year-old son.
But fate had other plans for 38-year-old Sciotti.
She was approximately 300 yards from home on Boiling Springs Road, across from the Allenberry Playhouse, when a deer jumped from an embankment onto her vehicle, landing where the windshield meets the roof, according to her brother, Nick Sciotti.
Sciotti’s car, a 2022 Nissan Altima that she’d purchased just three weeks prior, drifted into the lane of oncoming traffic and came to rest against a utility pole approximately 25 yards away, her brother said.
“The deer essentially landed on her head,” Nick Sciotti said. “The impact was so violent that it bent the frame of the car, the doors were not aligned.”
And not a single bone in Natalie’s face was left in tact, doctors told her family.
Natalie with her parents, Paul and Barb. Her brand-new Nissan Altima was completely totaled in the wreck.
Courtesy of Nick Sciotti
Natalie — who is also the head coach of the TNT Girls 14U softball team — was airlifted to Penn State Health Holy Spirit Medical Center, where doctors determined she had suffered a significant brain bleed. She was then flown again to Penn State Hershey Medical Center, where she remains as of press time.
The day of the crash marked exactly three years since the death of Natalie’s ex-husband, the father of her two children.
Natalie’s brother described her recovery as “a lot of two steps forward, one step back.”
“The nature of this type of injury goes back and forth constantly,” he said. “Different issues pop up.”
A GoFundMe for the Sciotti family had raised more than $47,000 as of Sunday, June 2.
Up until just under two weeks ago, Natalie was conscious. That’s no longer the case, however, her family remains optimistic.
“Anyone who knows Natalie nows she doesn’t take well to people feeling bad or sympathetic to her,” Nick said. “You make her fight for her kids and she quite literally will fight to the death.”
