Close call at Greeley body shop after semitruck tires crash through building
GREELEY, Colo. (KDVR) — An auto body shop owner and his family narrowly missed being hit by two semitruck tires that came crashing through the side of the business on Monday.
Robert Vigil has owned and operated Extreme Auto Body at its 12th Street location in Greeley for the last 30 years. He said on Monday, he was applying a coat of paint to a vehicle when he heard a strange noise.
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According to Vigil, he did not see damage right away and only realized something was wrong when a stranger said she saw what happened.
“She pulls up and she says hey, there’s a pair of wheels in your building, and I look at her and go, what are you talking about? She goes, yeah, wheels fell off of a semitruck and went inside your building,” Vigil said.
The part of the building in question is through a separate set of doors from where Vigil was working.
“I opened this door and I looked in, you know, and I looked over and I’m like, that doesn’t look right,” Vigil said.
Two semitruck tires busted out a window and took down a portion of the building’s exterior wall that faces U.S. 85. The tires each weigh about 100 pounds.
The tires hit the driver’s side quarter panel of a 1963 Ford Falcon that Vigil and his 86-year-old father work on together in their spare time.
“It hit the side of that car so hard that I would say it moved it over a foot, maybe foot and a half,” Vigil said. “It just busted the paint right off of the car. It just demolished it.”
‘Some semitruck is missing a pair of tires’
According to Vigil, his father normally would have been working on the car at the time of the accident but decided to stay home on Monday because of icy roads from the snowstorm Sunday night into Monday morning.
“Dad could have been here. Somebody else could have been here. I could have been here turning the compressor off,” Vigil said.
He said while it is a miracle everyone inside the shop is OK, it is now a mystery as to where the tires came from.
“Apparently, some semitruck is missing a pair of tires somewhere here in Greeley or Colorado, I have no idea where,” Vigil said.
He said since the incident, no one has come forward to claim responsibility or come back to the shop to claim the tires.
“The dude doesn’t know if somebody is dead. They have no idea what happened. All they know is they’re minus wheels and tires,” he said.
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He is also waiting for answers from the insurance company to help cover the costs of the damage. However, Vigil said he would rebuild his father’s classic car. It has been in their family for 40 years.
“I’m going to tear it apart, and I will take every piece back off of it again and I will sand it and I will redo the entire car again,” Vigil said. “This is for my dad.”
The Greeley Police Department is investigating.
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