“So yesterday we were having an Arlington Community Schools librarians meeting. We meet once every nine weeks and we were meeting at Crave at three o’clock after school so we were all five meeting there. Before I went to Crave, I ran into UPS to mail a package to my nephew in Washington. While I was in there, I had just paid and all of a sudden we heard this really loud sound like you couldn’t even imagine what it was. So we go out to see what in the world that could have been. It sounded like a car accident, maybe a car hit somebody and we see the back end of this white SUV going in to Crave like into the restaurant. And it continues to go in so we walk out because I had gone by to kind of see where we could all sit, you know, to have our little meeting and just to be able to fellowship a little bit and visit together before Christmas. I wanted to sit at the little couch and chairs by the fireplace and notice a lot of our high school kids were there studying for exams, had their iPads out. And then all of a sudden, you know, we see this and kids are crying. iPads are everywhere. Of course, all the glass and metal is all down and it was just a really scary scene, one of our kids from Arlington High School that graduated with my son from 2016 is one of the workers or managers there and I was so proud of her. She handled it so well like because she’s still young, she’s 20 or 21 years old, and she said, “I’m on the phone with 911, nobody come in, like let us let the emergency crews get here first to kind of help us evaluate the situation.” And a guy got out of the car that had just driven through Crave and said his mom was diabetic and she passed out or something. That’s why she just kept driving through.
So very quickly, the fire and ambulance and police officers get there, lots of them. Of course lots of kids are crying and scared. I mean, it’s really all of them. I mean there were very minor injuries. We were so thankful because it could have been a really terrible situation especially I don’t know, it would be terrible any time of year. It seems like at Christmas, it just would be extra emotional and hard to deal with. But everybody was good. A couple were taken to the hospital and another girl was taken because of a head injury. She hit her head and one had a gashed leg but they really all got out of the way miraculously. The coolest thing I think happpened after was the emotions, of course moms were running in checking on their children. They very quickly got all their iPads, their backpacks, and their phones, you know, because they were on tables and stuff like that are on the floor. And the officers and everybody that was working in there, were very quick to get everybody and their things and help calm people down. They just handled the situation so well. And so then I saw last night on Facebook that so many people came in and helped clean everything up. They got the car pulled out before we left and then they got everything cleaned up all the glass cleaned up, the floors mopped, and all the tables set back up. They were open for business this morning at 6am. As usual, none of their equipment was damaged, none of the cash registers or anything like that. So it was really kind of just a really tragic or traumatic experience that really turned out a lot better than it could have.”