Thankfully, no one was injured when his unattended tractor-trailer truck plowed into a church in Uniontown Friday morning.
City police said the truck crashed into the wall of Christ United Methodist Church at the corner of Fayette Street and Beeson Boulevard shortly before noon, embedding the front of the truck inside the building.
Officer David J. Rutter, city police crash reconstruction specialist, said the driver of the truck, William Holali Yaw Agbemasu of High Point, was making the first delivery of his truck-driving career to Mundell's Furniture in Uniontown when he left the vehicle unattended.
Rutter said Agbemasu went into the store but apparently forgot to set the vehicle's emergency brake allowing the idling rig to run amok down an alley, past a gas station and other businesses headed toward Frank's Auto Supermarket before crashing into the church.
Agbemasu said that he just got the job driving trucks for Corsicana Bedding Inc. of Corsicana, Texas, after being without work for two months.
Agbemasu said he thought he deployed the emergency brake, but firefighters who responded to the crash said they found that the brake was not in use while the truck rolled down the alley.
"This was apparently his first trip on his first day," Rutter said. "Unfortunately, things didn't go as he had hoped."
During the trip down the narrow alleyway, the truck sideswiped a few buildings, causing minor damage to the trailer, and also sideswiped a parked vehicle before crashing into the church, Rutter said.
Bob Shaffer, who works at the Salvation Army on Fayette Street, said he was in the alley taking a smoke break when he saw the unmanned truck roll past him, missing him by only a few feet.
"At first I wondered what was going on because a truck can't turn around in the alley and then I saw that no one was driving," Shaffer said. "It was moving about 20 miles an hour when I heard the boom and it hit the building."
Uniontown firefighters and employees from Burnsworth's Garage in North Union Township worked for more than an hour to stabilize the building with cribbing blocks and lumber supplied by O.C. Cluss Lumber Co.
"The fire department worked diligently to shore up the building to prevent further collapse," Rutter said.
After much preparation, the truck was slowly pulled from the brick around 1:30 p.m., leaving a gaping hole in the side of the three-story church.
Oil and other fluids from the truck also poured into the basement of the church, where firefighters worked to mop up the mess.
The building sustained serious damage from the impact, with interior walls damaged from the force of the collision.