NEW ORLEANS — A pile of rubble remains where a car went into a home on South Claiborne near Pine Street.
Standing in what’s left of his living room, Darryl Domino looks at his EZ Boy covered in shards of glass.
“This (glass) is what I would have been eating,” he said. “I would have been under the vehicle.”
Domino says that it sounded like a bomb went off when the car went through the front of his home Wednesday afternoon.
Fortunately for him, he says he literally just got up from his chair.
“When I’m telling you three to five seconds, five seconds was too long it was probably less than 3 seconds,” he said.
Domino recounts the story of what happened based on what the driver of the car told him saying, “that car barely got between the oak tree,” pointing to where he usually parks. “She took out the pole, she took out the corner of the house and drove right in on top of my chair.”
He says as smoke began to fill his home, he heard a screaming baby.
“I just went to try to get the baby and the old lady out. That’s what went through my mind. Just to get everybody out of the house,” he said.
But according to Domino, this wasn’t an isolated incident.
He says, that he regularly sees cars speeding down Claiborne Avenue, especially around 3 o’clock when school lets out.
Right next door, Domino’s neighbor Randy Legeia says he’s been living on South Claiborne for nearly three decades and expressed that the speeding down the street has gotten out of control.
“If I’m driving 35 mph in the center lane of South Claiborne, I’ve got cars coming around me like crazy,” Legeia said.
Legeia thinks there’s a simple solution to the problem.
“It seems like low-hanging fruit to do routine traffic enforcement like we see in other cities,” he said. “When I go to other cities, I see a lot of traffic enforcement. I never see any here, ever.”
As for Domino, he says after waking up the next morning, the only thing he can think about is how thankful he is everyone walked away alive.
“In a couple of months the house will be fixed but had that lady hit this tree and got killed in my front yard with that baby, I’d have to leave to move away,” he said. “I couldn’t live with that.”