Staff photo / Ed RunyanMichael Puhalla, owner of the house behind him on Salt Springs Road where Belle Vista Avenue dead ends in Youngstown, stands near the location where a car crashed into his house, killing the driver and destroying his house.
YOUNGSTOWN — The deadly crash Wednesday night into the side of a home at 1273 Salt Springs Road on the West Side came about after a Youngstown police officer chased the car from Mahoning at Belle Vista avenues.
The identity of the male driver was not available Thursday, but a Youngstown police report states that the officer chased the man after a worker at a business at Mahoning and Belle Vista flagged the officer down to tell him that the man had fired a shot at her in the business.
The worker was not injured, but she later told the officer that at 9:08 p.m., a man about 68 years old and about 5-foot-6 and 240 pounds with a gray beard in a gray or silver SUV-type of vehicle asked the woman if she worked there.
She said yes, and he started yelling at her and calling her names, she said.
She said she opened the door for him to leave and he pulled out a revolver and shot at her. Then she went outside and found the officer sitting at a traffic light and pointed to the grayish colored car involved. She did not indicate she was injured.
The officer said he chased the vehicle, but it got away heading north on north Belle Vista Avenue. The officer stated that he “didn’t even see him turn onto Salt Springs (Road), and I lost sight of him.”
The officer went back to the business, but the employee could not operate the camera system, and no bullets or shell casings were found.
As the officer was writing his report, he was advised that the vehicle was found inside a home at 1273 Salt Springs Road and the driver had died. A Youngstown police supervisor, as well as officers with the Accident Investigative Unit and the county coroner’s office, was called out to the crash location, the report states.
The man who died had no identification with him, and he was not immediately identified, the report states.
The house sustained significant damage, and Youngstown officials were at the home Thursday morning discussing the likely demolition of the home as a result of the crash moving the home off of its foundation several inches.
Michael Puhalla, owner of the home, might have been a little more unnerved by the damage to the home except that it has been a wild ride living there over the past three years.
The home is located where Belle Vista Avenue dead ends into Salt Springs Road. He bought the home in 2016.
Puhalla was not home when the crash happened Wednesday night because his insurance company had put him up in a motel after the devastating July 6 fire at the Torch Club Bar and Grill next door.
“I was waiting for the restoration company to come in and clean it. They were supposed to come possibly at the end of this week,” he said Thursday morning outside of the home, where a gaping hole in the home can be seen from the crash.
Kevin Flinn, Youngstown building and grounds commissioner, was there with several other city workers examining the damage and talking about when the city will take down the structure. Officials plan is to do it quickly.
The driver of the car apparently went through the intersection of Belle Vista Avenue and Salt Springs Road, through a parking lot beside Puhalla’s house and into the side of the house.
The Youngstown Police Department confirmed the death Thursday morning. Puhalla was also not home the night of the fire, but he had left windows open, and the smoke from the fire caused extensive smoke damage inside his home.
“The smoke was billowing into my house. It took six hours to put it out,” he said.
The building housing the Torch Club was razed, and the final work on that property was just completed recently. Straw covers the ground, apparently to grow grass on it.
The straw comes right up to the side of Puhalla’s house, where now, one can see the foundation of his house has moved several inches as a result of the crash.
Puhalla said it would appear that the driver of the car was traveling at a high rate of speed, may not have been able to apply the brakes and hit his house with tremendous force. Only the very back of the car was visible in the opening the car made. The first floor of the structure sliced the car at least part way in half, Puhalla said.
The view through the opening after the car was removed shows a mangled hot water tank, a set of cabinets laying on their back and a jumble of broken wooden beams and other undetermined contents of the house.
Puhalla and Flinn both said one of the most serious problems is that the crash moved the foundation. “You can’t rebuild that,” Puhalla said.
About three years before the fire, the Torch Club Bar and Grill experienced a chaotic gunfight May 23, 2021, that started in the Torch Club and ended with two men — Mikquan Stevens, 19, and Rayshaun Clay, 23 — being killed outside.
At about the same time the two men were killed, a third man — Charles Boerio Jr., 27, — died in a crash down the street near Greenwood Street — that police initially thought was gun-related and related to the gunfight at the Torch Club.
Boerio’s death, however, was later determined to have been the result of the crash. He had no gunshot wounds.
Puhalla said that incident actually was even more personal than just living next door to the gunfight. As the fight unfolded, a person fired a gunshot from the parking lot next to Puhalla’s house toward his house.
The bullet entered the side of Puhalla’s home not far from where the car crashed Wednesday night. The bullet went through the front of the house and came out the front door, Puhalla said Thursday.
Puhalla was sitting inside the home not far from where the bullet passed through his house. He was not injured. He said he thought it was firecrackers at first, but when he realized it was a bullet, he went outside and yelled, “‘Get out of here,'” he said. There were about 200 people around the bar and his home.
“So I’ve been shot at, smoked out and my house crashed through,” he quipped after talking about each of the three incidents. “It’s time to move. We’ll be moving now.”
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