Car plows into Market Street antiques store
This screenshot from the security camera video inside Trackside Antiques shows the moment the car crashed into the front of the building shortly before 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 4. Store worker Sandy McCracken can be seen on the right behind the checkout counter as the car comes in. Miraculously, no one was injured. (photo:Submitted )
The crash, recorded on the store’s security camera inside, destroyed the front glass of the building and one of the entrance doors, and also damaged several merchandise displays inside near the front.
Trackside Antiques owner Lerissa Douglas said that Sandy McCracken was working the checkout counter and watched the vehicle come through right in front of her.
Douglas said that no one was shopping or working in a booth at the front when the car plowed through the front, and no one was on the sidewalk out front at the time, either.
“We were very lucky,” she said. “We have a bench on the sidewalk out front that people like to rest on when they’re walking downtown, but nobody was using it at the time.”
She said Trackside Antiques will be closed all of this week as a construction crew fixes the damage, but might be able to reopen sometime next week if the work progresses enough.
Strangely, this is the second time since April 15 that a vehicle has run into the front of a downtown building, and in both cases no one was injured in the businesses.
Last Thursday’s crash involved a female driver in her 80s who had just turned onto Market Street from Cullom Street, and was intending to park in front of the beauty shop next door to Trackside Antiques.
She told Clinton police that as she turned onto Market Street, her oxygen tank slipped off the seat onto the front floor of her car, and the “next thing she knew, the vehicle was accelerating, causing her to collide into the building,” according to the police report.
Her 2019 Toyota C-HR subcompact SUV was heavily damaged and had to be towed from the scene, the report noted.
No charges were filed against the driver, whom the Police Department declined to identify.
A similar accident occurred on April 15 when a woman test-driving a 2024 Tesla T3 electric car crashed the vehicle into the side of the Dream Dance Studio on Commerce Street, about a block away from where last Thursday’s accident occurred.
That incident knocked a large hole in the building, sending broken glass flying all across the dance studio classroom inside. But there were no pedestrians on the sidewalk and no dancers in the affected classroom at the time.
The crash, which the woman told bystanders occurred because she “accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake” pedal when pulling out of the Commerce Street parking lot, wrecked the interior of one of three large dance classrooms inside the building.
Only the driver and two male passengers in the car were injured, but not seriously, witnesses and police said.
Dream Dance Studio owner Olivia Bartley-Hill said some children had been participating in a dance class in the affected room just minutes earlier, but had been moved to another classroom before the car hit.
That damage still has not been repaired.
