OREM — Neighbors say the homeowners avoided injury Wednesday in a car-versus-house ordeal that surveillance video showed happened when an SUV pulled up behind a parked car and then pushed it across the street.
The chain of events unfolded sometime after 11:30 a.m., according to neighbor Marcus Hight.
He said he arrived home and was immediately stunned to see his son’s car, which had been parked on the north side of 1600 North, had somehow crashed into the house across 800 West.
“Yeah, I think shock was pretty much the way I felt,” Hight told KSL TV. “My first thought was anybody home?”
Surveillance video from another neighbor’s house that was shared with KSL showed a silver SUV pull up behind the car parked on the road outside the Hight residence and sit there for multiple minutes before tires could be heard squealing as the SUV pushed the parked car forward.
“It almost looks like he lined up deliberately behind our car and just slowly pushed it into their house,” Hight said. “The people that heard it — it was just a very slow, screeching sound.”
Photos shared by a family member who lives in the house that was impacted showed the sedan three-quarters of the way inside after having plowed through the wall roughly couch-level.
“When we heard that the one son was there and literally 10 feet away, came almost right in his lap — we were so glad no one was hurt,” Hight said.
The home sustained substantial damage and a notice on the door Wednesday evening cautioned that the house was unsafe to enter or occupy.
A car was pushed into an Orem home by another vehicle Wednesday morning. (American Red Cross)
Neighbors said the SUV’s driver was taken into custody.
Orem Police said the 69-year-old driver was treated at a local hospital mostly as a precaution and then released. Police said impairment was a factor in the crash and the driver received a citation. He was not booked into jail.
Hight said an investigator asked him if he knew the SUV driver, but Hight said he did not.
“One of the police officers said he’d been on the force 16 years and never seen anything like that,” Hight said.
Hight continued to be in disbelief hours after the ordeal Wednesday evening.
“You’ll have cars driven into homes sometimes, but never pushed like this,” he said. “It was, yeah, quite puzzling.”
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