Published: August 25, 2009 06:53 pm      

Front yard crashes may be Leonard’s version of the “demolition derby”

PICAYUNE — You might call it “Leonard’s version of the demolition derby.”

Leonard D. Sones, who with his wife, Kim, lives at 743 West Union Road, has a front row, or actually a front carport, view of the entire exciting show.

Not one, but four, vehicles in the past year have come flying through his yard, tumbling and rolling, all but one coming to rest only a few feet from his house or front carport.

The fourth one recently won the derby.

One midnight it squared up the corner bedroom where he and his wife lie sleeping, hitting the wall right where the Sones’ headboard abutted the wall.

“She woke me up screaming, and I thought she was having a nightmare,” said Sones. “The actual crash didn’t wake me; it was her screaming.”

“I can’t believe this,” Kim screamed out. “Honey, they’ve hit the house.”

The impact knocked over a large chest of drawers next to the wall and bed.

An SUV had left the road, catapulted over a large planter in the front yard and smacked the corner bedroom, right where the headboard met the wall.

Sones slipped on his clothes and ran outside, expecting to see a bloody scene.

The driver backed up , drove through the yard, got back on the road and took off.

The driver didn’t get too far before she ran into the ditch on the other side of the road. Sones got in his truck, drove down and picked up the woman, who had already called 911, and sat her in his carport untill the emergency responders arrived.

They gave her a breathelizer test and she passed.

“She must have just been addled from the crash,” he said.

“Amazingly, everyone who has wrecked in my front yard has been sober,” Sones added.

Sones attributes the accidents to a long straightaway approaching his home from the east. “It’s about a mile, straight as an arrow, and they can’t resist picking up speed. But they don’t know that at the end of the straightaway is a hairpin curve. And my house is in their line of fire when they leave the road,” he said.

Headed wast on West Union, the straightaway starts just past the end of Sycamore Road and stretches about a mile to the hairpin curve on which Sones’s house sets.

The drivers who crashed are evenly divided by gender, two males and two females.

Sones, who is retired from the Pearl River County school system where he was director of transportation, describes the episodes like this.

The first driver came barrelling through his yard, turned over as he left the road and rolled up on the side of Sones’s pickup, doing $2,000 in damage to his pickup. That driver was from Oklahoma. The rest were local.

The second “crashee” fished-tailed right in front of his home, fell out of the vehicle onto the road (he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt), and his vehicle tumbled end-over-end, coming to rest on a light-pole guidewire between Sones’s house and his mother-in-law’s next door. “The truck was totalled, destroyed, completely,” said Sones.

“I got him off the road, checked him for injuries and he only had a few scratches. He immediately pulled out his cell phone, called his mom and started crying,” said Sones.

The third entrant to “Leonard’s demolition derby” spun off the road and came to rest right in front of his carport, pointed directly onto the road “as if she had parked it there on purpose,” said Sones.

“It is a miracle that no one so far has been killed, and that me and my wife have not been injured,” he said.

He said highway officials have put up directional arrows at the curve, and since then, there have been no mishaps.

Sones’s plight came up for discussion at Monday’s supervisors’ meeting in Poplarville when county consulting engineer Les Dungan told supervisors about Sones’s adventures and said that he was studying the problem.

He said it is a state-aid road and he is working on getting the curve heavily striped, warning signs installed on its approaches and rumble strips.

Says Sones, “Well, what can one say, but only that the Good Lord has been looking out for us -- and those drivers.”