FAYETTEVILLE,Ga. — The Fayetteville Police Department is trying to figure out what caused a dump truck to crash into a closed antiques business off of Highway 85 Thursday morning.
The crash happened around 10:15 a.m. at the Golden Days Antiques on Highway 85 in Fayetteville. Nobody was inside the business when the crash happened but investigators were stunned at the chain of events that landed the dump truck in the middle of the shop.
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Fire investigators believe the truck came careening off the highway, knocked down a utility pole, continued down an embankment destroying the shrubbery, went across the parking lot before crashing inside Golden Days Antiques.
“I was amazed at what I saw,” Jesse Dozier told Channel 2′s Steve Gehlbach.
Dozier is a member of the Joy City Church who share the plaza with several businesses.
He and other church members drove up right after the crash happened, early enough to see the truck driver get loaded into an ambulance.
“Glad that it was closed, that’s the main thing,” Dozier said. “Even the driver, he’s well, in the hospital so thank God for life.”
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Gehlbach spoke to Fayetteville Fire Chief Alan Jones who said the truck driver got himself out of the cab and didn’t look like he had a scratch on him.
Jones wasn’t sure if the dump truck driver had some sort of medical issue or blacked out.
“Don’t have any idea at this point,” Jones said. “He was transported, was conscious and self-extricated. We helped him out, put him in the ambulance and took him on to the hospital.”
Fire investigators had a difficult time trying to decide if it was safe to get the truck out of the building. They were worried about it starting a fire or causing the building to collapse.
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Jones said they called Clayton County’s “Trench Rescue” team to see if the could assist firefighters in shoring up support for the heavily damaged building.
“They put a couple of shores up in the building to make sure we could safely pull the dump truck out,” Jones said.
It took nearly three hours to get the dump truck out of the building while inspectors and engineers were still checking out how safe it was.
Gehlbach says the owner of the Antique business was too upset to go on camera but she did get a close up look at the damage.
She said it will be a long time before business will be able to return to normal.
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