City officials in El Cajon are considering more safety improvements to a stretch of Jamacha Road where a car crashed into the bedroom of a home and injured two people earlier this month.
“A preliminary study we conducted a few weeks ago shows that the street segments has a typical number of incidents compared to other collector streets,” El Cajon City Manager Graham Mitchell said in an email. “However, we are digging into the data more to see if there are improvements that are necessary.”
Mitchell also said a radar feedback sign and signs warning of a curve had been installed on street, a new roadway striping to narrow lanes will be completed in the next few weeks.
“These small safety improvements will hopefully slow down drivers and raise awareness of the curve,” he wrote in an email.
Residents on the block say they have witnessed a number of accidents on the street, and the owner of the unit that was damaged said he would like the city to put up a guard rail or other safety measures on the stretch of road in the 900 block of Jamacha Road where the crash occurred.
“And from what I‘ve been hearing, there’s been accidents from this street to the next street, from this side to that side, ” said Danny Cholagh, who owns the unit that was struck. “There’s been major collisions, I guess you can say.”
At about 2 a.m. Nov. 12, a northbound car on Jamacha Road approaching Gustavo Street veered off the road at a section that curves to the left. The car jumped the curb on the east side, tore over a lawn and smashed into a black metal fence, spun about 180 degrees and crashed backward into a wall.
The police press release said about 80% of the vehicle ended up inside the bedroom where a couple was sleeping. The man suffered a serious injury and the woman was treated for minor injuries. The male driver, 26, was not injured and released after undergoing a series of field sobriety tests.
“The cause of the collision was determined to be excessive speed due to the conditions of the curve on the road,” the press release said. “A building inspector was called to the scene and deemed the structure unsafe.”
Cholagh was back at the unit on Monday with a worker to inspect the damage. Despite the massive damage to the bedroom, there was no damage to load-bearing walls or gas pipes, he said.
His tenants, however, do not want to return.
“I don’t blame them,” he said. “Not until the city does something about this. They’re in fear for their lives.”
Cholagh said the couple appeared to be in their 70s and spoke Arabic but not English. He has been in touch with their daughter, who said her father had a broken neck but was released from the hospital last Tuesday or Wednesday.
Cholagh, an El Cajon resident, said he and his family bought the unit two years ago as an investment, and the tenants had lived there about 14 months.
“They were great tenants,” he said.
A resident in the same building said she recalled five crashes in the few years she had lived there, and other residents interviewed by television news crews following the crash also said they were fearful of walking near the street.
Data from UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows eight accidents with injuries have occurred on the two-tenths of a mile stretch of road between Sunrise Shadow Court and Gustavo Street since 2016. Of those, three accidents occurred just south of Gustavo Street, the site of the Nov. 12 accident.
Cholagh said he was told a similar accident occurred about two decades ago.
“There was a police officer who told me he knew an individual’s parents who were sleeping in that bedroom, and a car crashed into it 21 or 20 years ago,” he said. “The very same unit. I don’t know how true that is, but that’s what the police told me.”
Cholagh said he plans to do major renovations to the unit as well as repairing the damaged room.
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