SPRINGFIELD, MA (WGGB/WSHM) – Authorities are investigating after a car crashed into a store on Boston Road in Springfield Monday morning.
“Oh, God, I am very disappointed to see it like that,” said James Hunter.
Hunter lives down the street from the Kiwipix convenience store on Boston Road in Springfield. He shared his disappointment with Western Mass News after a car drove straight through his neighborhood market on Monday.
“This is a great store. They’re great people and they’re very convenient. They sell a little bit of everything, then I play my lottery and converse with some of the customers,” Hunter added.
In photos shared with Western Mass News from store owner Mazhar Iqbal, a car could be seen after having crashed right through the front window of the store and going all the way through to the back of the building. Iqbal was there cleaning up the mess and told us how he was feeling in those moments following the crash.
“Oh, it’s a disaster. We got a call around two in the morning. This wasn’t a pleasant morning, but thank God nobody got hurt. If it would’ve happened during the day, we would’ve had a lot of people inside. It could’ve been a customer or employee,” Iqbal noted.
Iqbal told us they’ve owned their Boston Road business almost 10 years and have never had anything like this happen and they are still in shock.
“It’s our support. It’s hard to know when an operating business stops, but it’s going to be a process through an insurance company and it might take a little time and we’re going to figure out what we can do,” Iqbal added.
Hunter told us he’s lived down the street since the 1970′s and, in recent years, he’s noticed an uptick in unsafe driving in the neighborhood.
“People are doing 50, 60 miles an hour, even in the evening at night. It gets bad, so I don’t let my wife go out at night with the traffic the way it is,” Hunter said.
Springfield Police told us that the driver was sent to an area hospital with non-life threatening injuries. They added that the driver reported that their brakes stopped working, which caused them to crash into the store. It is unclear whether or not speed was a factor and the crash remains under investigation.
Copyright 2024. Western Mass News (WGGB/WSHM). All rights reserved.