Friend, colleague identify 2 top Nevada museum officials injured in crash that killed 3
Paleontologist Becky Hall, left, holds bone fragments of Nevadadromeus schmitti next to her husband, Dr. Joshua Bonde, right, at the Nevada Science Center in Henderson, Wednesday, May 11, 2022. Friends and colleagues have raised funds to support two top Carson City museum officials who were badly injured in a fatal head-on crash that killed the woman’s 10-year-old daughter and two Las Vegas men last month on a remote stretch of U.S. highway in southern Nevada. (Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A friend and a colleague have identified two married Carson City museum officials who were injured in a head-on vehicle crash that killed the woman’s 10-year-old daughter and two Las Vegas men last month on a remote stretch of U.S. highway in southern Nevada.
Dinosaur fossil researchers Joshua Bonde and Rebecca “Becky” Hall and Hall’s daughter, Nola Humphrey, were traveling in a pickup truck that collided with another vehicle, killing Nola, family friend Chris Palladino told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Monday.
“She was a typical 10-year-old: Full of life,” Palladino said of Nola. “She was a very lively, fun little girl.”
Bonde is director of the Nevada State Museum. Hall is executive director of the Children’s Museum of Northern Nevada. Nathan Tobey, a children’s museum board member, also confirmed their identities.
“It’s the worst,” Tobey told the Review-Journal. “It breaks my heart. They have done so much good for the community in northern Nevada.”
The Nevada Highway Patrol reported June 1 that two Las Vegas men, driver Victor Jacuinde-Garcia, 22, and passenger Giovanni Vazquez, 24, died when their Chevrolet Trax SUV traveling north crashed into a Dodge Ram pickup heading south about 9:25 p.m. on May 20 on U.S. 95 west of Mercury.
Nola was taken to Desert View Hospital in Pahrump where she was pronounced dead, the Highway Patrol reported, without naming the girl or the people in the pickup.
Palladino said another of Hall’s daughters, Keira Humphrey, 12, also was injured in the crash and was hospitalized, but has been released. He said Hall was being treated at University Medical Center in Las Vegas and faces a long recovery.
Palladino said the family was focused on “keeping Nola’s memory, and healing physically and emotionally.”
“They’re very strong people and they’re doing as best they can,” he said.
Palladino confirmed that a GoFundMe fundraising page was created to help Bonde and Hall with medical bills and other costs. By Wednesday, it had raised more than $55,000.
“I think that’s pretty amazing, and I think it shows the close-knit nature of this city and this state,” Palladino told the Review-Journal.
Tobey, who spoke briefly with Hall on Saturday, told the newspaper the crash happened while the Chevrolet was passing a large truck on the two-lane highway.
The Highway Patrol did not respond Wednesday to email and telephone inquiries from The Associated Press about the crash.
Bonde and Hall, co-founders of the Nevada Science Center in Henderson, were profiled a year ago in a Review-Journal story about their work uncovering the first-known dinosaur native to Nevada. It came to be known as Nevadadromeus schmitti.
They also were featured in the Vegas PBS show “STEAM Camp” about the center’s dinosaur excavation dig in central Nevada in June 2022, and they co-authored an article in the Journal of the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science in 2022 about support from their research on a fossilized Nevadadromeus schmitti bone recovered in southern Nevada.
Bonde was hired by the state museum in Carson City in 2022 after serving as curator and director of the Las Vegas Natural History Museum from 2018 to 2020. He received his doctorate in geology and earth science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he worked as an assistant professor for six years, according to his LinkedIn profile. It called him a proud Indigenous scientist focusing on Nevada’s Great Basin region.
Hall holds a master’s degree from UNLV in geological and earth science; was director of education at the natural history museum; worked at the PaleoWest environmental resource firm in Phoenix; and was a dinosaur expert for the National Park Service in Boulder City, the Review-Journal reported.