Whatever you thought was a shit way to end your week, it probably wasn’t nearly this bad. On Sunday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis resident Bruce Redding returned home from the gym—which he went to, on a Sunday!–to find an SUV lodged into his roof, leaving much of his home in shambles.
And in a truly devastating turn of events, Redding had just paid off his mortgage. The Post-Dispatch has more:
Authorities say the speeding SUV had hit an embankment and launched into the air, like something out of a Hollywood movie, before crashing down on Redding’s roof in the 5900 block of Lillian Avenue. He was told the SUV sped down Mimika Avenue to where that street ends in a T-intersection in front of his home.
“I can see straight through my house,” said Redding, 66, who had recently paid off the home. “This is everything that I’ve worked for all my life, and for someone to run through a stop sign and destroy it ...”
Police arrived to the home around 12:40 p.m. Sunday and discovered the SUV, what appears to be an Envoy, on the roof, with the driver still inside. It was a tricky operation, according to the newspaper’s report, because firefighters aren’t accustomed to using climbing ladders while at the same time working to remove someone from a car.
“We had accessed the roof and the structure to see if it was safe to get on the roof,” Michael Arras, the St. Louis Fire Department’s deputy chief of special operations, reportedly said. “It was determined that it was viable. We put just enough on the roof to make the extrication and get off.”
The driver was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, and his condition wasn’t known. Redding, meanwhile, spent the rest of his weekend salvaging whatever he could, and thankfully he told the Post-Dispatch his house was insured.
“The good thing is, I’m alive,” he said. Indeed.