JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Multiple people at Gotham City Limit on Jacksonville's Southside are lucky to be alive after a car smashed through the front of the store Tuesday night.
Wednesday is normally the busiest day of the week at Gotham City Limit, that's when the store releases new comic books. Instead, Ben Kingsbury spent the day cleaning up, building a temporary wall and being thankful that no one was killed when a car plowed through the front of his store.
"It sounded like an explosion, like a bomb went off," said Kingsbury.
The sound that Kingsbury heard was a silver Ford Focus ramming through the front of the store seconds after a man and his son walked through the door.
"When the car came in he was walking down the side," said Kingsbury, "my comic racks held the bookshelves up so it didn't collapse on top of the gentleman and his son."
A store employee named Santana Merka was organizing a display at the time of impact.
"I heard Santana yelling out for help, I jumped over the debris and glass at the front, find here, she was pinned under one of the bookcases in the front," said Kingsbury.
Merka has since been released from the hospital but has serious dental injuries as a result of the crash. The woman who drove the car walked away unscathed.
"My book cases here stopped her car from driving through the wall into the next shop," said Kingsbury.
Store regulars who saw the news on Facebook stopped by with cleaning supplies and to show their support. Kingsbury knows a higher power is looking out for him, his store and his employees.
"I know it would seem like you don't have a guardian angel because a woman drove her car through the front of your store," said Kingsbury, "but Santana was at the front of the store. It was jarring to see how terrifyingly close so many people came to major catastrophic injury."
Kingsbury said that the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office employees on scene told him that the woman was able to leave the scene without taking a sobriety test because she was not slurring her words.
When First Coast News reached out to JSO about that claim, the agency sent the following statement:
"An officer shall determine if the driver is ill, injured, on medication, or has a disease or physical and/or mental impairment not caused by an alcoholic beverage, a chemical substance or controlled substances. The driver must be exhibiting indicators of impairment and there must be enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a DUI investigation."
As for Gotham City Limit, Kingsbury hopes to open the store at 11 a.m. Thursday morning.