Truck drives through front window of hair salon

Update 6:30 p.m. Friday: The driver in Friday’s accident at Headquarters was not under the influence of alcohol, according to Bainbridge Public Safety Deputy Director Frank Green. However, the cause of the accident is still under investigation, Green said.

 

A pickup truck drove through the front plate-glass window of the Headquarters Hair Salon on Scott Street in Bainbridge.

The accident happened at approximately 2 p.m. on Friday, June 13. Bainbridge Public Safety officers and Decatur County EMS are on scene.

We have been told by Headquarters employees that none of them were injured, despite being in the hair salon when the truck crashed through with a loud boom.

Witnesses helped the driver, an adult male, out of his Chevrolet pickup truck, which had a handicapped license plate. EMS personnel attended to him in the back of an ambulance and later transported him to Memorial Hospital in Bainbridge.

Below is a video interview with a man who was sitting in the Headquarters salon at the time of the accident. We have made the video preview small for mobile phone viewing, but you can view the HD version of the video by clicking through to Youtube.

According to Bainbridge Public Safety Deputy Director Frank Green, the pickup driver–whose name was not immediately known–was headed south on Scott Street and drove into the parking lot of the shopping plaza. The truck drove through the only parking space in front of Headquarters that didn’t have a vehicle occupying it, and then forcefully crashed through the window. The truck punched holes in two walls and came to rest partially in a hallway. A tanning bed could be seen pushed by the truck against the wall of a small cubicle room.

Headquarters owner Ryan Phillips said thankfully no one was injured, although an employee and customers were sitting in a lobby on the other side of the damaged wall. Some of the salon’s employees ran out of a back exit.

A man named Fred Cronin who was in the landromat just south of the shopping plaza saw the fleeing employees and ran into the building. Cronin, a former first responder for a local industry, saw pipes gushing out water and saw exposed electrical wires hanging down above the truck. Based on his previous training, he searched for an electrical cutoff and turned off power to the building.