Lehigh Acres homeowners react to truck driving into their home

Reporter: Jolena Esperto
Published: Updated:
Car Crashes into Lehigh Acres Home

A trail of destruction through a Lehigh acres neighborhood. A pick-up truck driver crashed into a home, backed up, and then put their foot in it.

The driver crashed into another car before his pick-up truck did a swan diver into a canal.

Jessica Vandross lives here with her husband and kids and Thursday night, as she was waking up and getting ready for her night shift, she hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet when a pickup truck slammed into her home.

A home where a husband, wife, four children, 2 dogs, and a cat live, has 10 years’ worth of memories.

“I was actually sitting up. I had just gotten up to get ready to go to work, so I always lay on the side, the left side. All I remember is just being thrown to the floor, honestly, and just cinder blocks and everything just falling all over us,” Vandross said.

She wasn’t the only one in the room. Her husband was too.

“I thought it was an earthquake, quite honestly, and then my husband was on the floor. He seen the big pickup truck inside. He just reversed and Florida and kept going,” Vandross said.

The truck kept going, getting into at least one other crash before plunging into a canal nearby.

WINK spoke to Matthew Thiemann over the phone. He said he was in the passenger seat of the work van that same truck hit after hitting the Vandross home.

“We were slammed into extremely hard as if it felt like we were sitting still on. Someone just hit us out at like 100 120 miles an hour and hit us so hard shoved us on the road across the oncoming lane of traffic and all the way over along that canal, and immediately right behind us that person went past us and dukes of hazzard right on into the canal,” Thiemann said.

Thiemann said that after the crash he helped the other driver out of the canal. Both he and Jessica said they are thankful they weren’t hurt.

“Thankfully, everybody, all the pets are safe. Everybody’s good,” Vandross said.

The Vandross family is still in a state of shock.

Florida Highway Patrol has not yet identified the driver responsible, but they said a 27-year-old man was driving the Ram pickup truck that crashed into the canal nearby Thursday night.

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