Car crashes through obby of St. Joseph Warren Hospital; no one hurt

Staff report

WARREN

A driver who crashed through the front windows of St. Joseph Warren Hospital at 9:58 a.m. Wednesday near the main entrance and deep into the main lobby said she either had brake failure or pressed the wrong pedal.

Neither the driver, 64, of Niles nor anyone else was seriously injured. The driver was taken to the emergency room down the hall but only as a precaution, said Jonathon Fauvie, Mercy Health spokesman.

The driver “stopped in the parking lot” and “went to pull forward and either her brakes failed or she hit the gas pedal instead and drove into the front lobby of the hospital,” a Warren police report says.

She was cited for failure to maintain control of her vehicle.

Fauvie said the driver had come to the hospital to pick up a patient.

Jacqueline Clifford, who was there driving a transport van, said she noticed the vehicle and “heard the car revving. It went right into the hospital. The next thing I knew, the front wall was gone.”

Clifford said she believes a woman had been sitting in lobby but had just gotten up from her seat at the point where the crash took place.

Rebecca Miller of West Farmington said the car stopped just short of where she was in the registration area in the back of the lobby.

“I just saw glass flying,” she said. Her first thought was that it was gunfire.

Fauvie said the car hit a glass partition for a recently built gift shop. “Thank God they were not moved in yet,” he said of the gift shop’s employees and visitors.

Crash photos in the police report show that the air bags on the woman’s 1999 Pontiac deployed.

The vehicle finally stopped when it hit and damaged a framed wall that divides the lobby from the registration area.

The crash closed the hospital’s entrance. Anyone coming into the hospital was being directed to a door to the left of the main entrance near the emergency room or the north entrance.