Residents live in fear
When Robyn Wyber heard the police siren, she leapt from the sofa and scrambled to the hallway.
Just as she fell flat on the floor, a car came through her living room wall.
It was the fourth time in 18 months she has been rattled by a car crash at her Hamilton home.
The male driver of a Subaru Legacy was fleeing police after doing a U-turn outside an alcohol checkpoint. The Subaru clipped another car on the Clarkin RoadHeaphy Terrace roundabout before ploughing into Wyber’s unit.
‘‘I just don’t feel safe here any more,’’ Wyber said on Sunday morning after a sleepless night.
‘‘If he hadn’t have hit the other car, he would have kept on going and hit me.’’
The 62-year-old bakery worker’s Clarkin Rd next-door neighbour Maureen Houghton died after suffering a heart attack days after a car came through her and husband Gary’s lounge wall in May 2016.
Wyber had come home from a friend’s house and sat down on her blue couch to check her Lotto tickets before going to bed. It was 11.30pm when she heard the siren.
She leapt up and fell on her stomach a metre into her hallway just as the Subaru hit her home.
‘‘Every time I hear a siren, I actually go back there. I run. And I thought, oh, here’s the siren.
‘‘Just as I went to move, I saw the curtains move. I fell over there and winded myself.
‘‘I saw the curtain move, but I didn’t click it had hit my house. Then I went out the door to see if they needed an ambulance.’’
The car had cracked the living room window frame and shattered glass everywhere. The front cladding of the home was destroyed.
Wyber’s son’s partner, Brian Mourits, said the family understood the fleeing driver was four times over the limit.
‘‘It was lucky there was concrete outside, as that’s what stopped the car – it was actually high speed, he was going fast.’’
Senior Sergeant Ray Malcolmson said police saw the car do a U-turn at a nearby alcohol checkpoint. Officers tried to catch up to it, but found the accident when they reached the roundabout.
‘‘They were a long way back and the vehicle went through the roundabout and hit a car and went off and crashed into the lounge,’’ Malcolmson said.
‘‘The innocent party whose car was hit wasn’t seriously injured, but he was checked out at hospital.’’
The driver of the crashed car was detained and breath-tested by police.
The fence the fleeing driver ploughed through was only a month old after a previous car came through it and into the property.
Another fleeing car hit Gary Houghton’s fence not long after Maureen died, Wyber said, adding that Gary was also struggling.
Gary, 76, felt most sorry for his neighbour but said the latest crash had brought the loss of his wife of 51 years back.
‘‘I can’t dwell on it . . . She’s in a better place. I know where she is.’’
They called an ambulance for Maureen the night the car crashed into their living room.
‘‘Of course, she never came home,’’ he said.
They had often talked about a new letterbox, a double-glazed front window and a few days in a hotel for an anniversary or the like, he said.
He got all that after the crash, but he doesn’t have Maureen. Still, he’s happy in his home. ‘‘It’s good to be able to sit there [in my house] and watch the world go by, but sometimes it gets a bit close,’’ he said.
There are seven schools in the area, Mourits said.
‘‘We have had a security guard here all night – it could have been during the day when schoolkids are walking past.
‘‘Imagine if this was 8.30 in the morning, the number of people walking up and down the road.’’
He had written a letter to Mayor Andrew King.
Mourits would like to see council install barriers or bollards along the berms to prevent vehicles mounting the kerb.
‘‘It’s a death waiting to happen, really – there’s already been one.’’
Speaking yesterday, King would not be drawn on whether he favoured bollards, a barrier, or some other form of improving resident safety.
That decision would be up to the council’s new traffic safety committee, headed by councillor Dave Macpherson, he said.
When pressed, King said he would get that committee to look at the situation under urgency.
‘‘I don’t think putting a barrier there is the answer. We need to look at why cars are speeding up and down that road in the first place.’’