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Employees luckily away when SUV crashed into Mt. Prospect stores

If it had happened just minutes earlier, two employees of a Mount Prospect car rental business would have been squashed.

Hertz employees Shane Music and Marcin Pogorzelski left to pick up a rental vehicle late Monday morning, and when they returned they found an SUV had smashed into their computer system — exactly where the two spend most of their day.

“If we would have been standing where we normally do, we would have been hit,” said 28-year-old Shane Music. “The wall caved in to our side, right where we do all our rentals.”

Authorities said an elderly woman was pulling into the strip mall at 905 East Rand Road in her Mercury Mountaineer, but for some reason drove straight over a curb, through the front window of H&R Block next-door, and veering right through the side wall of Hertz.

“The entire front of the building is destroyed,” Music said. “I'm sure we would have heard something, but I don't know how fast we would have reacted to it.”

The H&R Block, which took the blunt of the crash just before noon, was not open because it is the offseason for tax work, fire department officials said.

The driver of the SUV was already out of her vehicle when emergency crews arrived but was transported to a hospital to be evaluated, said Mount Prospect Fire Department Batallion Chief Randy Uidl.

“She was more shaken up. There were no physical injuries,” Uidl said.

The latest instance of a vehicle crashing through a business is the area's fourth in the past two weeks.

On Sept. 15, a Jeep plowed through a Rolling Meadows bank injuring two tellers, and on the same day a Honda Civic smashed through a Prospect Heights grocery store's storefront.

No one was injured inside the grocery store.

On Sept. 7, a 71-year-old St. Charles woman “inadvertently stepped on the gas rather than the brake” and injured five people at a Warrenville restaurant when her sedan drove through an outdoor seating area, according to police.

A city building engineer inspected the Rolling Meadows strip mall after Monday's crash and concluded that the building remained structurally sound, although heavily damaged, Uidl said.

The wall between the H&R Block and Hertz was mainly drywall, but because it included electric wiring, power was shut down to both businesses.

Employees from Hertz were transferred to the company's Palatine store, as the business will be closed until electricity is restored and the wall is repaired.

  Marcin Pogorzelski, assistant branch manager at Hertz car rental office on Rand Road north of Central Road looks at the damaged wall behind his service counter Thursday afternoon in Mt. Prospect. The damage occurred when a car crashed through the front window of the H&R Block office next door. “Luckily I was out making a pickup otherwise I probably would have been sitting there,” Pogorzelski said. Bill Zars/bzars@dailyherald.com