As car crashes into his bedroom, student saved by skin of his teeth

Clothes are scattered on the couch and the unmade bed. Dirty dishes idle on the kitchen counter.

Except now there’s a gaping hole in the wall where a Subaru Legacy smashed through the window Saturday night.

After being rear-ended by a stocky, gray Pontiac Grand Prix, the station wagon crashed into Srinivasan’s apartment at about 1:10 a.m. The vehicle’s crumpled front end broke through the rectangular window on the apartment’s east wall, right above Srinivasan’s bed and computer desk.

At the time, Srinivasan was in the bathroom.

“I went to brush my teeth before bed – and that’s when it hit,” Srinivasan said. “I thought it was the sound of a bottle breaking.”

The Legacy’s impact sent brick and earth tumbling onto his bed and desk. Dust piled with broken glass in miniature hills, mingling with parts of an evergreen shrub planted outside the ground-floor window. A few broken bricks on Srinivasan’s pillow and half a cinder block on the sheets made for morbid decoration.

“If I was sitting by the computer desk or on the bed, I might have been (badly) hurt,” Srinivasan said.

He suffered minor cuts on the inside of his right knee and shin, a result of what he believes were glass shards propelled into the bathroom. The force of the impact scattered debris around the sink and toilet in the apartment’s bathroom, about a dozen paces from the site of the crash.

Thirty minutes after the accident, the goings-on inside the apartment created a surreal tableau: Srinivasan and his sister, LSA junior Smrithi Srinivasan, surveyed the mess, mulling over whether to call the landlord and insurance company. Ann Arbor Police Department officer Renee Bondy took photographs. The rocky descent from the vehicle’s front bumper to the floor made Srinivasan’s living space look like a transplanted mountain ravine.

Bondy said this type of accident is common. The woman driving the Grand Prix was not hurt, but the woman whose car hit the building was taken to the hospital, Bondy said.

Full accident reports were not available yesterday morning. The basic report filed Saturday night only said that the accident involved one car rear-ending another and that one driver was transported to the University Hospital. If drunken driving was a factor, or if either driver were seriously hurt, comprehensive reports would have already been completed, AAPD Sgt. Laura Ouellette said.

After the debris settled, the Buick sat still, neatly wedged in its brick cubbyhole until a tow truck dragged it away at about 2:30 a.m. The front bumper remained on the window ledge until the tow truck driver picked through the remains. The Grand Prix had been towed a few minutes earlier.

Srinivasan stayed at his sister’s place Saturday night. He said he isn’t sure where he’ll live for the next few days.

A service that handles catastrophes cleaned up most of the rubble and boarded up what was left, he said yesterday.

The building was constructed before the 1970s, and there is a chance that the builders used lead-based paint. If a lead test comes back negative, Srinivasan said he would be able to move back into the apartment 48 hours later.

Because he’s graduating this year, Srinivasan won’t need to worry about renewing his lease. But if he did stay at the apartment complex, there would be certain stipulations.

For one, he said he would consider moving one floor up. “Or at the very least I would adjust the position of my bed so it’s not so close to the outside.”