Car hits tree, spins into home

A four-door Mitsubishi tore across two yards, gouged asphalt, hit a tree and sent cinderblocks cascading into a basement Sunday morning, injuring its two passengers and leaving a Waynesboro family mending their fractured Forest Drive home.

Jessica Apsey, husband Steve Shifflett and their teenage son and daughter were sleeping when the car driven by Tara Harris, 19, of Waynesboro, crashed backwards into their home at about 5:20 a.m., scattering debris indoors and out, and causing structural damage that Apsey suspects will continue to show its signs for years.

“I guess for about a hundred years we’ll be picking up auto glass,” she said near the family’s front window, where the car came to a stop.

“We just heard this loud ... I don’t want to say a crash, because honest to God I thought a car hitting a house would make a more catastrophic noise ... but a thud,” Apsey said.

“A loud thump,” said Shifflett.

Apsey’s first thought was that one of two dogs in the house had knocked over the Christmas tree.

Then she thought of the entertainment center.

Then her husband found cinderblocks strewn about the basement and its sofa, with the car pressed against the basement window.

“I don’t know what I would have expected,” said Apsey, “but not that.”

Harris had been driving north on Vedette Avenue when she hooked over a ridged lawn then tore an inch-deep streak into the asphalt on Forest Drive while skidding sideways, Cpl. Todd Armentrout said.

Apsey believes the car dragged part of a brick from the first lawn to her property before launching it about 25 feet, where it broke through a wooden swinging chair, slid under the family’s parked Dodge Durango and came to rest near a fence. Other debris damaged a parked car.

Meanwhile, the Mitsubishi rotated into the house.

Armentrout said alcohol was not a factor and that Harris lost control for an unknown reason while traveling at an undetermined speed. Harris and a 21-year-old male passenger were alert at the scene and treated at Augusta Medical Center. They were later released. Harris faces a charge of reckless driving.

After Shifflett’s basement discovery, Apsey opened the front door.

“And all I could see was vehicle,” she said.

Worried about structural damage, she moved inside, called 911 and circled out the back door before speaking with the passengers.

The family spent most of the day cleaning the house, marked now by cracked walls, cracked kitchen tiles and a shifted brick foundation through which drafts blow into the home.

The family has lived in the home less than two years, but in that time Apsey has already been struck in an accident on Forest Drive, which she described as a dangerous road.

“Seventy-five percent of people that come through here run those stop signs,” she said.

But the family was able to joke Sunday and spoke with the driver’s family.

They’ve also chalked up some destroyed items as “easily replaceable,” while counting one blessing: Although initially saddened that their 21-year-old son would not be home from the Marine Corps for the holidays, they now see the absence as fortunate.

“He would have been sleeping on that sofa,” Apsey said.