Thomas MacMillan Photo
Len Honeyman Photo
Rae Boykin was looking for a caterer Thursday morning for an NAACP event when she looked up from her computer — and started screaming. A car was headed straight towards the front window.
Smash!
A silver Dodge Durango barreled into the building, shattering the plate glass window at 545 Whalley Ave.
The crash happened at around 10:30 a.m.. No one was injured. The crash appears to have been an accident.
The car was unoccupied when it jumped the curb and hit the building.
Moments later, a man ran up with a bag of diapers, hopped in the car and sped away.
Police were unable to locate the SUV.
Boykin (pictured above), an administrative assistant at the NAACP, was alone in the office at the time of the crash. Firefighter Gary Tinney was in an adjoining office belonging to the Firebirds, a local organization of black firefighters.
At 10:45 a.m., Boykin was standing outside police tape on Whalley Avenue, as cops and firefighters investigated the crash. Still shaken, she explained what had happened.
She was in working at her computer, trying to find a caterer for an NAACP fundraiser next week. Looking up, she saw an SUV reversing across Whalley Avenue from Hobart Street. “Why is that guy backing up?” she thought to herself. When the car didn’t stop, she thought “Oh my god, this man’s crazy.”
Then she started yelling and ran into the Firebirds’ office to find Tinney.
“I heard her scream and the car was coming,” said Tinney. He said he was on the phone at the time.
After the car smashed the front of the building and came to a rest on the sidewalk, Boykin and Tinney saw that nobody was inside.
“As we’re talking, this guy comes running,” Boykin said.
Tinney shouted to him, “Yo man, is that your car?”
But the man didn’t stop. He was carrying a bag of diapers, Tinney said. He threw the bag in the Durango, jumped in after it, and sped away west on Whalley Avenue.
Livable City Initiative neighborhood specialist Elaine Braffman happened to be driving by at the time.
“I heard a car squealing away. It was tearing you-know-what up Whalley,” Braffman said. “I tried to catch up with him. … I couldn’t find him.” Click on the play arrow to hear Braffman describe what she saw and to see firefighters cleaning up after the accident.
It was the kind of thing you see in movies, but don’t ever expect to go through in real life, Boykin said. “It was all in slo-mo.”
The car had New York plates. Tinney and Boykin caught the number. But when police ran it, the plate came back to a white Honda.
“Somebody had bogus plates on the car,” said Officer Sam Reed, who was interviewing witnesses at the scene. With bogus plates, the driver wouldn’t have cared if he was spotted, Reed said.
“To me it looks like an accident,” Reed said. The driver may simply have let his car roll unattended from Hobart across the street and into the NAACP.
A building inspector said the damage to the building was not structural.
NAACP branch head James Rawlings (at right in photo, with fire Battalion Chief Kevin Delaney) showed up a few minutes later. His first question was about possible intent.
“We’re always concerned around those things,” he said. Because of the sensitive nature of NAACP work, “there are people out there” who may want to hurt the organization. That’s the reason why NAACP offices don’t usually publish their address, he said.
“We’re always targets,” Rawlings said.
The office is covered by insurance, Rawlings said. As of early Thursday afternoon, no estimate of the cost of repair had been made.
This is sure to bring out another round of the "Blame it on the Streets" coalition!
Good that no one was injured.