Dunwoody family raises money to bring injured UGA student home
Dec. 17 abruptly turned into the worst day of Tami Slipsager’s life.
Her son Ayden, a University of Georgia freshman, was in a terrible skiing accident.
“A mother should never get the call that I got,” she told Atlanta News First.
Ayden Slipsager was on vacation in Colorado a week before Christmas. The 2025 Dunwoody High School graduate is now recovering — unable to walk — in a Denver hospital.
It was icy on the slopes when a stranger found the 18-year-old unconscious and called for help. Ayden Slipsager had a fractured skull, broken ribs, broken collarbone, a collapsed lung and more. When his mother first saw him after the accident, he wasn’t awake. He had been intubated, and braces were covering parts of his body.
“We don’t know what he hit because all the damage that happened to him probably came from trees, but they said they didn’t find him anywhere near trees, so we don’t know if it was ice or a stump or rock. We don’t know,” she told ANF’s Tracey Amick Peer.
The morning before the incident, Tami Slipsager said she was worried something might happen to her son.
“I said, ‘Ayden, I really want you to take some lessons before you go back out.’ I literally said in the text message, ‘I don’t want you to kill yourself,’” she said.
The teen has been accepted into the Shepherd Center in Atlanta for rehabilitation, but the medical flight home could cost six figures. His friends have started a GoFundMe page to raise money for his flight.
“Unfortunately, the cost to medically transport him from Colorado to Atlanta is overwhelming — nearly $100,000,” the page states. “This is an expense that insurance does not fully cover, and it’s a financial burden his family cannot take on alone.”
“We’re not people that ask others for help. It’s actually quite difficult to accept,” Tami Slipsager told Tyisha Fernandes of Channel 2 Action News.
As of Friday afternoon, the GoFundMe raised more than $52,000 of its $100,000 goal.
Tami Slipsager told Fernandes that Ayden is heartbroken by the accident, knowing he can’t return home to finish his freshman year of college.
“He had texted me two days before the accident,” she said. “He said ‘Mom, I ended up with a 3.95 GPA, my lowest grade was an A minus one.’ He said. ‘I already applied to honors college,’ and he wants to major and his major in business and finance. And he’s just that kid that you don’t have to tell him when to do something and how to do it, he just does it.”
About the Author
Hunter Boyce is a writer, digital producer and journalist home grown from a Burke County farm. Throughout his career, Hunter has gone on to write sports, entertainment, political and local breaking news for a variety of outlets.
