A teenager admits she doesn't want much more to do with her "mates" who took off and left her with a large hole in her head, after a car ploughed through a Hastings home.
The 14-year-old, who spoke with Hawke's Bay Today with her grandparents alongside her, can't remember the crash which landed her in Hawke's Bay Hospital last Friday morning with a deep, open cut to her head and two fractures.
The five-seater Subaru Legacy she was in contained six occupants aged 13 to 17.
It had left Margate Ave in Flaxmere about 6am and smashed through a letterbox, a spare bedroom of a house, and two fences.
One person was inside the home at the time of the crash but was not injured.
A witness said he saw a group of young people run off after the crash, before he helped the bleeding teen onto the front lawn.
Police have since referred several teens to Youth Aid.
The teen told the Hawke's Bay Today she suffered two fractures to her head and her forehead was "split open" close to her left eye.
Doctors at Hutt Hospital, where she had been transferred, stitched her head wound and told her she was fortunate not to be worse off.
"They said 'you are lucky it is not as bad as it looks', and that I'm lucky to survive the crash," she said.
"It's healing pretty fast, I think, and it's only my eye that gets sore."
The teenager said she could not remember the crash and woke up in the ambulance.
"I did not even know I had a big hole in my head until I got a phone and took a picture of my head and noticed it was split open," she said.
"I thought 'what the hell. How could that happen?'. I was sketching out."
The teenager's grandfather said when he first saw her injury he thought it was much worse.
"For grandparents to see that sort of thing from your grandchild ... it just broke our heart."
He said police had contacted them and wanted to speak to his granddaughter once she had recovered.
The teen says she was a front seat passenger in the car.
She says she was not aware that it was allegedly stolen, until after a friend picked her up that night from another friend's place.
"He came and got me and then went to get other people."
The teenager said she did not want to speak to the other occupants of the car again following the incident.
"I have not talked to anyone that was in the car crash," she said.
"I'm just going to hang with my two friends down the road (from now on)."
She is due to get her stitches out at Hawke's Bay Hospital on Thursday afternoon.