SEMINOLE, Fla. (WFLA) — Mike Ross was woken up by a loud bang around 12:30 a.m. Saturday.
“It sounded like a bomb. Literally. It was amazing how loud it was and how the whole house shook.”
He ran outside to find a gaping hole in his Seminole home and watched a green Dodge pickup truck speed away.
“Everything that was here just got blown back against the wall into the other side of the room,” he said.
A hit-and-run driver apparently drove off their neighborhood street through their yard, into the front room of their house.
“I mean, that was a bedroom. That could’ve been somebody killed. My grandkids used to sleep in that room, against the wall,” said Martha Ross, Mike’s wife, who turned to 8 On Your Side hoping to find the person responsible.
“I saw all the lights and stuff and came out the front floor, and here was this guy in a green pickup truck, out of the hole he’s created in the wall of the home,” Mike added.
The couple filed a report with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, which the couple says used broken vehicle parts left behind at the scene to determine the likely model of the truck. But the driver? Nowhere to be found.
“Very angry. I am livid,” Martha added, saying it’s the third time a car has driven into their house, which sits in the curve of their neighborhood street.
The couple reached out to their insurance company, but in the meantime had to build a wooden structure on which they suspended a blue tarp donated by the Sheriff’s office.
“If he’d been two feet over that way, it’d gone all the way through the entire house,” Martha said.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating.
