It was supposed to be just another late-night drive. But for 25-year-old Navya Gadusu, a Chicago resident with roots in the small village of Cheruvugattu in India’s Nalgonda district, Saturday night on northbound Interstate 65 in Crown Point, Indiana, became the last ride she’d ever take. She was young, she was bright, and by all accounts, she had so much life left to live. Now, a community is grieving, and a family thousands of miles away is shattered.
The crash happened at around 11:15 p.m., about a mile south of the Crown Point exit. A red 2016 Dodge minivan carrying seven people was crawling along the right lane at somewhere between 10 and 15 miles per hour. The reason? The van was trailing another vehicle that had broken down and was barely moving. Nobody in that van could have seen what was coming.
A 2015 Chevrolet Suburban was closing in fast from behind. The driver didn’t clock just how slowly that minivan was moving until it was almost too late. They yanked the wheel to the left trying to dodge it, but there wasn’t enough time or space. The SUV clipped the back left side of the minivan hard enough to send it spinning off the road and tumbling into a ditch. In a single, violent second, everything changed.
Of the seven people riding in that minivan, two folks sitting up front walked away without a scratch. They stayed in the vehicle and didn’t need medical attention. But the five people in the back? That’s a whole different story. None of them were wearing seatbelts, and every single one of them paid a serious price for it. All five were rushed to nearby hospitals with injuries described as severe.
Navya was among those in the back. She was critically hurt in the crash, and despite the efforts of medical staff at the hospital, she didn’t make it. Her injuries were just too severe. The young woman who had traveled so far from a small village in India to build a life in Chicago took her last breath in a hospital bed in Indiana, far from home but surrounded by a country she had chosen to call her own.
Indiana State Police confirmed that the vehicle the minivan had been trailing — the one with the mechanical trouble — wasn’t involved in the actual crash at all. It had already moved ahead. Northbound I-65 was shut down for roughly two hours as troopers worked the scene, mapped out what happened, cleared the road, and pieced together the timeline of the crash. The investigation is still ongoing.
Back in Chicago and across the ocean in Cheruvugattu, people who knew Navya are trying to make sense of something that simply doesn’t make sense. She was 25. She was ambitious. She was the kind of person people describe as someone going places. And just like that, on a dark stretch of highway in northern Indiana on a Saturday night, her story was cut brutally short. Her family, her friends, everyone who loved her — they’re all left holding pieces of a life that deserved so much more time.
