UPDATE (Aug. 27): The Murray Police Department put out a press release today, identifying the driver as 33-year-old Holli Plunkett of Buchanan, Tennessee. The release confirmed that Plunkett was not injured in the crash.
MURRAY – If not for the heavy representation of first responders at the intersection of Ninth and Sycamore streets Friday night, a passerby might not have noticed the vehicle inside, what used to be, Hair Studio. While shattered glass littered the parking lot, the white blinds hung in the building’s large front windows were seemingly unscathed.
At noon on Saturday, the building was surrounded by caution tape, an orange sticker affixed to the door, marking the building condemned. Property owner Takina Bomar was on site.
Bomar said although someone put the sticker on the door early that morning, no one had told her that the building had been condemned, so she was still holding out hope that it was just a precautionary measure to keep people from going inside the building.
“They told us to take pictures for insurance purposes, and we’re about to board up the front to keep people from coming in,” she said, adding, “If you went in there, you’d be brave. It’s a mess. During the daylight hours, it looks a lot worse than it did last night.”
The ground floor was home to Bomar’s salon, where she works with eight other stylists.
“It was completely inside the building,” she said of the SUV. “It took out the front wall where our desk is, and the wall behind that and the shampoo bowls. At least everybody is OK, and it didn’t happen during the day when we were all here.”
“Patty – she’s one of the ladies who works here – she thought she was going to come to work this morning,” Bomar said, laughing. “She was like, ‘Oh it can’t be that bad. Surely, I can come in and work. I said, ‘You need to come look at this. There’s no power, no water.’”
As of press time, the Murray Police Department had not released information about the accident beyond a Facebook post asking drivers to avoid the area at 8:34 p.m. According to Bomar, the woman driving the vehicle had just gotten off work and was traveling south on Ninth Street. She explained that the driver, who was not injured in the crash, has a medical condition that causes her to black out.
“She said that she felt it coming on but didn’t get pulled over in time,” Bomar said. “A friend of mine saw every bit of it. He was texting me. He said, ‘She just didn’t stop; she was probably doing 25 or 30 miles an hour.’ It’s a miracle that she’s OK.”
While the salon was closed, at least one of the two tenants living in the apartments upstairs was home. Bomar said they are staying at the Murray Inn and Art Gallery through the weekend, but she is concerned about what they will do now.
The apartments were furnished, so neither have furnishings readily available to put in a new apartment or home. She said she felt particularly bad for one of the tenants because they only recently moved to Murray and do not have a well-established support system here.
Bomar is also concerned about her coworkers. She said the stylists would like to stay together, but because of state oversight, it is not as simple as “just moving somewhere.”
“We have to have everything state-board inspected and state-board approved,” Bomar explained. “There has to be a plan in place before we can even begin (to think about opening) up somewhere else. There’s a salon that just went out a year or so ago, and it would be perfect; but it’s not set up.”
She said there is a space in front of Walmart where a salon went out of business a year or so ago that would be perfect, but it would take a while to get it set up for business. In the meantime, Bomar spent Saturday morning talking to other local salon owners to find places where everyone can go temporarily.
Excellent and timely article. Thanks, Jessica. This information was not publicly available anywhere else. Thanks to The Murray Sentinel for taking the initiative and writing the article. Looking forward to learning more about this situation.