Sunday Fundraiser To Aid Groom Injured in Honeymoon Tragedy

A basketball tournament fundraiser is being held on Sunday in honor of .

In June, Crystal and Victor, both 22, were parasailing on their honeymoon in the Bahamas when the safety straps on the newlyweds' harnesses broke and they fell.

What should have been a relaxing honeymoon instead turned into a disaster, leaving Victor in a Florida hospital bed with multiple internal injuries, grieving the death of his wife, Crystal of Roseville, who he had married just 12 days before.

The fundraiser is meant to help raise money for Crystal’s funeral and Victor’s medical expenses.

Bella Vista High School junior varsity basketball head coach Kevin Lindner is helping setup the event with the help of Grant Yamasaki. Lindner said they are not hoping to raise a specific amount of money.

“We’re just trying to help Victor as much as possible and raise as much as we can,” he said. “We have a lot of raffle items that will be up for raffle throughout the day and a couple of silent auctions.”

Lindner has known Rodriguez for nearly five years and he was the best man at Rodriguez’s wedding.

“We’ve been really close friends for many years,” Lindner said. “We used to work with each other. We’ve just been really close.”

The fundraiser will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hardwood Palace in Rocklin. There will be 28 teams competing in the tournament.

“It is a completely full tournament. We had to turn away some teams,” Lindner said. “There’s going to be a lot of people there. It’s going to be nice.”

The teams had to pay a $150 entry fee to play three games.

“That’s a pretty good price for three basketball games,” Lindner said. “It’s five on five and all of the money is going to Victor.”

Lindner said he and Yamasaki thought of the idea after going to a softball game fundraiser for Rodriguez in July.

“We had a meeting and just kind of rolled with it. All of a sudden it became pretty big,” he said. “We’re both really close to Victor and we wanted to try to help out any way we could.”

Lindner said they have used nearly every form of communication to spread word of the event.

“We went around to all of the local parks and recreation districts, gave them our flyer. We also used facebook,” he said, “basically it was just word of mouth too helped us get as many teams playing as we could.”

Lindner said Rodriguez is doing better.

“He’s starting to move around and he’s starting to look a lot better. He lost a lot of weight while being in the hospital but he’s feeling a lot better,” Lindner said. “He’s actually going to be at the tournament, which will be really nice.”

Lindner said he hopes to see a lot of people on Sunday.

“Even if you’re not playing you can still come by and support. The basketball is going to be good,” he said. “There’s a lot of really good teams and there’s actually going to be a lot of really good players coming out to play in the tournament.”