“I hope to never experience this again,” says Johnny van Veghel (58). The Helmonder has barely recovered from the shock. On Sunday evening he was still watching some TV when around a quarter past eleven a car smashed into the front of his house. “A big flash of light and then a huge blow.”
That blow, according to Johnny, was deafening. “At first I thought a bomb had fallen. It was like war. Everything shook and the dust fell. I saw nothing at all for a while,” he describes. He heard voices outside. “I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t open my front door. I was quite startled, but I was not injured. I only had a small wound on my hand.”
“When the driver heard the word ‘police’ he ran.”
The voices Johnny heard outside were from his neighbor and the driver of the car, a 31-year-old man from Helmond. He had gone off the road with his car and crashed into Johnny’s house.
“My neighbor saw the driver get out of his car and heard him say ‘nothing was wrong’. When my neighbor mentioned the word ‘police’, he ran away. The neighbor still went after him. I I ended up walking to the front of my house through the neighbors.”
According to Johnny, the driver of the car is an acquaintance from the neighborhood. “He lives not far from me. I’ve spoken to him once. I suspect he was under the influence. According to my neighbors he was acting fuzzy and waddled a lot.” Officers were able to arrest the driver a short time later.
“There was a bit of draft, so I turned the heating up a bit.”
Johnny just stayed in his badly damaged house last night. “I lay down on the couch. There was a draft, so I turned up the heating. I could also go to a hotel, but I preferred to stay in my own house. A carpenter from the Volksbelang housing corporation propped everything up last night. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay here.”
“I was very well helped. Everyone was very interested,” says Johnny about his neighbors. Johnny has less praise for the police. According to him, there was ‘there was little understanding and no one was asked how he was doing’. “I did say something about that.”
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