Car crashes all the way through Modesto triplex unit

Rising early probably saved a Modesto man’s life Wednesday morning.

About 5:45 a.m., the driver of a black sports car veered off southbound College Avenue at Arc Way – just south of the Modesto Junior College East Campus – and barreled through the living room and bedroom of a triplex unit there.

The vehicle, which police said is a two-door black sports car, went out the south wall and came to rest in a vacant lot adjacent to the triplex. A passerby saw the male driver run from the scene.

The resident, who asked to be identified only as Mike, said he’s a light sleeper and was up as usual by about 1:30 a.m., when he showers and turns on the Weather Channel. When the crash occurred, he was in the kitchen. He said it didn’t startle him all that much. “I thought my heater had blown,” Mike said.

A man driving by in a pickup stopped to help, and a neighbor from across College also came over, said Mike, who uses a motorized scooter to get around. The two men cleared a path so Mike could navigate the scooter to get outside. “It’s amazing how many friends you have when something like that happens, who help you,” he said.

A couple of hours after the crash, Mike was parked on his scooter on pavement along the Virginia Corridor bike path, which crosses College south of the vacant lot next to his home. “I’ve lived here 13 years and nothing like this ever happened before,” he said, surveying the damage and seeing so many of his belongings – his couch, other furniture, clothing, decor and memorabilia, a new TV set – broken and/or strewn across the lot.

He said he routinely sits outside his home and watches the College Avenue traffic. “Lots of speeders come through,” he said, and he thinks the College “road diet” – making the avenue one lane each way, with a turning lane in the middle – was a mistake and may have made the speeding worse.

There were skid marks on College on Wednesday morning from when the driver headed into and through the triplex unit.

Police have identified the registered owner of the vehicle, said Officer Kalani Souza, and there had been no report that the car was stolen. Souza said it was by “the grace of God” that Mike was up and in the kitchen at the time of the crash. If he’d been in the living room watching the Weather Channel – well, the TV and broken couch lying in the dirt speak to what might have been.

Souza said the Red Cross was on the case already, arranging temporary housing for Mike. Property management employees were on the scene, Souza said, to get his belongings gathered and back in his unit, then board it up securely until it can be repaired.

Mike was grateful that his in-home support services caregiver, Gloria Serrano, was OK. The night before, she slept on that living-room couch, as she sometimes does when he’s going to need her help in the night. But Tuesday night, she was at her own home.

She was there Wednesday morning, though, comforting Mike and checking on the condition of the musician’s guitars and other musical instruments. She found one guitar outside, but still in its case and undamaged. A keyboard lay upside down in the dirt. But she recovered guitars and a banjo safe inside the triplex unit.

Serrano has worked with Mike for about eight years. “I’m the only person he has. He always says my kids and I are his family,” she said as she salvaged his belongings. Looking at the broken couch she’d slept on so often, she, too, considered herself lucky. “I’d be dead if it had been last night I stayed here,” she said.

This story was originally published November 4, 2015 at 10:35 AM with the headline "Car crashes all the way through Modesto triplex unit."