 | | CREDIT: Richard Marjan/The StarPhoenix | | Keegan Miller lays on his bed, where a trailer burst in just over where he was sleeping. |
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 | | CREDIT: Richard Marjan/The StarPhoenix | | Keegan Miller's basement bedroom this morning, where the end of the trailer came through the wall. |
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 | | CREDIT: Richard Marjan/The StarPhoenix | | Police investigate the path of a trailer that came unhitched and hit a house at the corner of Avenue V and 29th Street West. Police are looking for the driver. |
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Saskatoon police say a 31-year-old man turned himself into police this afternoon after a runaway trailer crashed into a west-side house. The driver had fled the scene after the crash, and police had been on the lookout for him today.
Keegan Miller was sleeping in his basement bedroom, when he was rudely awakened by a loud crash and pieces of something falling on his face.
Shocked, Miller tried to sit up, and banged his head on something hard just a few feet above his pillow. It was a sheet of drywall. Something big had crashed through his bedroom wall.
"I thought my friends were just playing tricks on me and putting something on my face," said Miller, an hour after the ordeal. "I was totally out of it."
The 19-year-old University of Saskatchewan agriculture student didn't know it at the time, but he just had a close call with a flatbed trailer.
Around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, a stucco company was driving westward on 29th Street West towards a job, when its tandem axel trailer came off the hitch. A witness saw the runaway trailer crash through a school zone traffic sign, nearly miss a tree stump and tree in the yard, and crash into the east side of the home, located on the corner of Avenue V North and 29th Street West. Miller lives there with his mother, Shona Gryba.
"I woke up to insulation hitting me in the face, and chunks of drywall," Miller said, taking off his hat and shaking debris from his hair. "I came outside and the trailer's in the side of the house. It happened so fast that the back wheel was still spinning."
Once a tow truck hauled the trailer out of the side of the home, the family of two peered through the hole, assessing the damage.
The trees that lined the side of the yard were crushed into the four by two-metre high hole, leaving a near perfect rectangular 'window' above the student's bed. Splintered wood, insulation and broken objects were scattered throughout the bedroom. Chips in the blue paint on the opposite wall of the student's room indicated that objects had been hurled against the back wall from a shelf when the trailer burst through the wall.
Miller jumped through the hole from outside onto his bed to explore the scene.
"All my hockey trophies, my diploma, my grad pictures," he listed as he dug through the rubble. Miller picked up a broken sandcastle statue from the floor. Gryba explained that the sandcastle was from Miller's dad, who had passed away from brain cancer eight years before. Miller was speechless.
Richard Harder, a 16-year-old Mount Royal student, was following the truck and trailer on the way to school in his car, when he witnessed the crash.
"It looked like the truck was trying to pass the trailer in the left lane, and then I realized that the trailer wasn't hooked on to anything," said Harder.
"The truck was just going and the trailer fell off and mowed some stuff down and hit the house going about 50 km/h. For once, I had a good reason for why I was late for school."
Harder said that the truck stopped and the driver and front passenger got out of the cab, but they quickly got back into the truck and drove away. Harder spoke to Miller when he came outside to see what had crashed through his bedroom. He then proceeded to school to tell Gryba, who teaches Grades 10 and 11 at the high school.
"I thought he was kidding and was just trying to get a rise out of me," said Gryba. "So I walked outside and they pointed across the park to the house and told me I better go home."
The truck was back at the house by the time Harder returned to the scene with Gryba, and he said that there was a different driver behind the wheel.
Saskatoon Police spokesperson Alyson Edwards said the 31-year-old man who turned himself in is charged with one count of failing to remain at the scene of an accident and one count of driving while disqualified, along with seven Traffic Safety Act violations, which concern the improperly hitched trailer.
Two employees of Interprovincial Stucco, who were sitting in the truck while police investigated, said they had "driven around the block to look for the trailer," and that is why they fled. The third man claiming to be the driver was talking to police and later refused comment.
"I guess they won't hire us to fix it, hey?" said Jeff Whiteford, who stepped out of the back of the cab of the truck to light a cigarette.
"This just went from bad to worse," said Miller. " I'm mad. The guy that was driving even came up to me and said, 'I know you need to go through insurance, but just so you know, we do drywall'."
Miller said that he was just glad that he was sleeping later than usual, because he was missing class to help remodel his bedroom's connecting bathroom.
"Usually my mom comes down and checks on me in the morning. She's usually in my room at that time waking me for school, and she could have been standing right there and would have gotten taken full on in the face. I'm just glad she's okay."
"I just don't think the bathroom remodel is going to be a priority anymore."
dmario@sp.canwest.com
