RAYNE, La. (KLFY)-- The owner and employees at The Crossing at Mervine Kahn told News 10 they returned from an out-of-town trip after getting a call about a woman who ran into their business Saturday evening on July 6.
The business was built in the 1800s. Thomas's family bought it in 2008, and it opened in 2009. It's a smaller part of their wedding facility which they use a lot for weddings, small rehearsals, and then receptions. The place can fit up to 120 people. Birthday parties, baby showers, etc., are also held there.
“We had a couple of support posts down. All of the boards have skid marks on them. Some of them are cracked. The building cracked at the top of it. The glass and everything else was just broken. So everything is just having to be repaired,” Natalie Thomas, daughter of the owner and also an employee, said.
Thomas said a woman who police have yet to identify backed out of their building and then ran into another building nearby called Antiques On The Avenue.
“They [the police] spoke to her. She said that her blood sugar had dropped and they took her blood pressure and they said it was high. She was just panicked and they took her in an ambulance and that's all we know as of now,” Thomas recalled.
Risha Stevens, an employee at Dollar General next to the damaged business, recalled hearing a loud noise that day.
“We were just minding our business, working a regular day, and as always, it is always something crazy,” Stevens said. “I don't know what happened. She had backed her car into it and then she went straight across the street to that antique shop over there. She told the cops maybe that her sugar dropped or she just wasn't feeling very well but I'm praying and she's feeling good and everything's alright.”
Stevens said about two or three years ago, Dollar General had an incident with a car as well. She wasn't working there at the time, but her father was when somebody had run straight into the building and knocked all the glass out. She said it wasn’t as bad as The Crossing at Mervine Kahn.
“I was just glad that it wasn't us again. I mean, to be honest. Of course, praying for whoever was behind the wheel because it's a dangerous situation to be in,” she said.
“When we got that call, it was pretty heartbreaking," Thomas said. "This building has a huge impact on this city. It's been here for a long time. We're grateful that nobody was in the building; being that it was on the weekend because normally we have people in there. We're just fortunate that no one was in there and no one was hurt.”
She said they have an event in three weeks, and they are working as fast as they can to get the building up and running for the event.
The business staff said they would talk with the city and suggested getting bollards to prevent another crash from happening in the area.
Another area damaged was at the Martin Luther King Center basketball court which is closed until further notice after it was vandalized.
"We had snapped everything back last week and to come back and see that they're popping up by themselves tells me that the mechanism for snapping the tiles together has been damaged," Todd Trahan with New Academics, LLC, said.
Trahan said they use Snap Sports, which is a 12-inch by 12-inch snap tile that locks them together and creates the court.
Police arrested Trevion Lamar Hollier, 19 on multiple charges, including reckless operation of a motor vehicle, in connection with the damaged basketball court.
“We snapped everything back down and we're going to monitor it for the rest of this week to see if any of those tiles start releasing again which would tell us the connection points have been weakened, the locking mechanisms have been weakened, and that would require us to change those tiles out for new tiles,” Trahan said.
