Tooele business cleaning up with gratefulness after car slams into building

TOOELE, Utah — With the slogan “You’re in good hands,” the Tooele Allstate Insurance office handles any kind of catastrophe a customer calls about.

But right now, Debra Harris, the owner, is doing her own crisis cleanup inside her office. On Tuesday, she was busy clearing off her desk, which was pushed against the wall instead of in the center of the room, and boxing up papers and binders. She looked over some electronics like a printer and scanner, wondering if they still worked.

That’s because, on Friday, a car crashed right through her office.

“She came kind of on a little bit of a diagonal, where she hit my desk here,” Harris said, walking from the boarded-up outside wall into the center of the room where her desk used to sit. “And then it kind of took it and went this way into the wall.”

At the time, Harris said the Allstate Office was full, and she was meeting with an 86-year-old new client and the client’s grandson.

Typically, she said, the clients would come back into her office. But Harris decided to walk out to the lobby instead to meet with the grandmother and grandson and work out there with them.

That’s when the car slammed right through the glass and past where the three would have been sitting at her desk.

Car smashes into Tooele insurance building

“My doors were blown in and all my furniture that was here was all into that office there,” she said, pointing outside her office room and toward the back of the building.

The car hit the back wall, pushing through the wall into a storage room. The chairs her clients sit in were thrown several feet.

“They 100% would not have survived,” Harris said of the grandmother and grandson.

Everyone rushed outside uninjured.

“I’d never met this lady, and I couldn’t stop hugging her and telling her how grateful I was that she was okay,” Harris said.

She said she and employees at the business next door checked on the driver and passenger, a couple. Police and paramedics arrived and took over from there. Harris explained that she’s since learned they are both okay.

Out of anyone, Harris understands accidents happen.

“We were safe,” she said, of what matters. “Everyone’s fine.”

She feels everyone was truly in someone’s good hands. And for that, she’s thankful.

“I just feel like we were watched over,” she said. “That during this circumstance, everything that could happen happened in the right way.”