Holy crap! I just saw a car plow... (part 2)

See previous post ("Holy crap! I just saw a car plow into a baby store!") for the background on this one.

OK, so now they're (still) clearing wreckage away from the store. The entire front face is just about gone, with only the doors left, really. The cinder-blocks seem to have mostly pulled apart, more than they actually broke; in fact, I saw a guy walk right on top of a loose one with no trouble. When they were hoisting the car onto the tow truck, a cinder-block was stuck to the bottom, too - an entire block, mind you - and it simply fell limply to the ground, with a small, pathetic sort of ka-chunk, as if it were no more surprising or impressive then the tiny shards of glass that were falling off at the same time.

The support frame for the windows is just about completely gone; hanging down in its place is a long, silvery metal-encased thing supporting either a light switch or an outlet - probably still working, though I don't bother getting close enough to see for sure, let alone bother to ask. Some of the Styrofoam-y ceiling tiles are gone now, as is much of the insulation material for the front part of the ceiling; you can the whitewashed metal bones of the ceiling from below. Apparently, though, the roof is stable; the crime-scene tape that was wrapped around the car before the tow truck came is both gone, and has gone unreplaced and workers are already clearing the wreckage from the storefront.

There's still a scattering of the shattered remains of what used to be tempered-glass windows all around the front of the store. It's bizarrely pretty; like chunks of ice or crystal if you look at the little piles, or like stained glass without the stain if you look more closely at the larger of the individual pieces. There's tiny fractures inside each smooth-faced chunk, in an almost cobweb-like pattern. Not the stereotypical, Halloween-y cobweb pattern, but the one you get with less predictable spiders, the loose and scraggly kind that still manages to look like it's got a purpose or pattern to it. The sunlight catches in the cracks, and it's honestly kind of cool-looking. It seems so strange to see something so beautiful come out of a moment of chaotic, terrifying destruction. I actually have a mad urge to take some chunks to use in an art project, but the owners of the store are so shaken up and I'm sure that would be just plain rude not to mention outright insensitive right now, so I don't.


Apparently, this is what happened: the older woman in the car was trying to park in front of the store and, well... she hit the wrong peddle. Very much the wrong peddle. Thankfully, she must have realized it pretty quickly, since it stopped only a few feet into the store. But the lady working there said she was terrified, thinking it wouldn't stop at all. I know exactly what she means, actually; anyone who's been hit by a car or been in a serious accident would (I got hit while riding my bike when I was 13, if you're wondering). It's the adrenaline kicking in; it makes everything seem to happen so slowly that whatever's coming at you seems like it really will never stop, and afterwards you realize that you can barely remember anything of the experience except for a few snapshot-like images (a momentary view of azure sky as you fly off your bike, the tire or headlights of the incoming vehicle...) and the slow-mo horror of HOLY CRAP CAR WHAT THE HELL CAR CAR CAR COMING CAR WHAT THE-! And you remember it as so being so tortuously long that you in hindsight wonder why you spent so long standing there or laying there flinching, instead of running or rolling out of the way a little more.

The woman's still shaken up, even over three hours later. I don't blame her in the least.

She also said that not five minutes prior to the car crashing through their front window, a woman her adorable little blonde, blue-eyed infant daughter were browsing the front of the store. Yes. In exactly the same part of the store where the car came through a couple of minutes later. The store owner informed me that a couple of cribs that had been in the front were damaged from the force of the crash.

If that child had still been there...

If that child had still been there...

Yeah.

It's like 80 or 90 degrees out there... but a shiver went through me just then.

-Jamie

Holy crap! I just saw a car plow into a baby store!

As we were pulling in to the shopping center parking lot, a taupe-colored car, a sedan I think, just... plunged would the the appropriate word I think, front-end first into the Once Upon A Child baby goods store on W. New Haven Avenue. The driver - an older lady who was very surprised and immediately jumped out to ask if everyone was all right - claimed she was trying to park at the time. The car bounded right over the curb and plowed through the glass-and-cinder block storefront, shattering tinted shards of window glass everywhere. I heard the deep, dry crunch-thunk of the crash and the high-pitched shatter of the windows from halfway across the parking lot, through a closed car window no less. Its airbag also never managed to deploy, which everyone there agreed was a bit of a surprise (I had to wonder if it had not been properly installed or something; you sometimes hear about that kind of thing with used cars, for instance, and considering it looked as if the brakes hadn't even been used...). Incredibly enough, no one, including the driver, was injured despite the store being open at the time.

The owner had the presence of mind enough to call 911 immediately, as did at least one other person at the scene, so police arrived quickly, and the store was evacuated just in case, on account of it was missing a huge chunk of the front now. Some of the ceiling tiles are even screwed up; the metal that holds the windows up and against each other crumpled like tin foil, taking part of the ceiling with it, I think. You can right now still see the insulation from the ceiling poking out in places. The glass is in about a million and one pieces, and it's scattered in little piles all over the sidewalk and everything. Weirdly enough, both front doors seem fine, though. They're just now towing the car out of the store front. I'll probably go and talk to them, see how they're doing.


Sorry, I don't have pictures - I don't have a camera with me. It was pretty impressive, though. Hope insurance covers the repairs...

UPDATE, 11 AM-11:15 AM: One of the other-store owners in the same shopping center at the scene said they'd post it on YouTube, so I'll probably be able to link it at some point. The front of the store is just... havoc, right now. Said other-store owner said Once Upon A Child probably won't be able to open that location for another month, with that kind of damage. Bizarrely, it turns out the car may not have even been going fast enough to trigger the airbags. Which is kind of dumbfounding, given how easily it plowed through cinder-blocks.

I watched as they loaded the car slowly onto the tow truck, with the musical tinkle of falling glass accompanying every jerk of the the chain (in one of those odd cases of your brain making weird and totally inappropriate connections, my immediate thought was "wind-chimes!"). The car itself, turns out, has only one busted mirror and some scratches. Kind of hard to believe, but there ya go.

If I can find that other lady's YouTube posting, I'll link it soon as I find it, all right?


-Jamie