Miller’s employee recounts crash

WASILLA — Kelly Holmberg never saw the pickup coming.

There isn’t a window on that side of the Little Miller’s Express coffee shop on Bogard Road. All she knew for probably a full minute on April 23 was that the wall exploded, she flew 10 or 15 feet, her nose was very bloody, the air was filled with mocha powder, and she was covered in various flavors of syrup.

“You know that expression you didn’t know what happened?” she said. That about summed it up, until she went outside. “When I got out to the porch, then I saw the (truck).”

The accident could have been fatal, but for a string of what Holmberg describes as tiny miracles.

The first bit of good fortune was where she was standing. Two feet to the right and she could have been crushed against an unforgiving countertop. Two feet to the left and she would have been standing in the pickup’s path.

“It’s like the Lord made everything happen so it would be the least amount of bodily injury,” Holmberg said. That’s why she said she and her husband refer to it as the “perfect accident.”

The second small miracle — her pregnant sister, Kendra LaCroix, was in the bathroom on the other side of the shop.

Later, when she heard that the pickup, driven by Ashley Hilton, was at one point airborne after launching off a snowberm, Holmberg said she realized it was another minor miracle no one was parked at the drive-through window when the pickup landed there. Miller’s, a popular spot for ice cream, often has carloads of children parked in the same spot, waiting at the drive-through window.

“That would’ve landed right on top of them,” Holmberg said.

Holmberg and Hilton — the driver of the truck — were both hospitalized. Alaska State Troopers haven’t released a cause of the crash, though initially troopers reported distracted driving was a factor. Troopers have said Hilton ran the stop sign at Seldon Road and clipped a sedan in the other lane before hitting Miller’s.

Holmberg said her church community rallied around her Sunday, prayed with her and surrounded her with love.

Monday was the two sisters first day back at work since the accident April 23. The two decided to return to work on the same day.

But don’t go thinking the accident gave Holmberg a week off work. In the wake of the crash that took out the west wall of the shop, she rushed to open her family’s other Wasilla-area shop on Lucus Road and Parks Highway four days early, and to get the Bogard Road shop repaired and ready to reopen.

The walls went up overnight. Holmberg said she has a great contractor who stayed late to do it. They needed to, Holmberg said. The stand had a lot of expensive stuff inside.

Her coffee shop employees turned out to scrub the place down, clean up all the broken glass, syrup and mocha powder. On Facebook, she said, there’s a picture of her in her hospital scrubs making lists of what needs to get done.

Thankfully, Holmberg said, LaCroix watched her kids. Holmberg’s husband, a Spenard Builders Supply employee, took off work. She said she doesn’t think she could’ve managed it without them.

“This was way over my head. I know how to run a coffee shop. I don’t know how to build one,” she said.

She said she’s been running the coffee shop for 12 years, since her family opened it up when she was in high school.

And, of course, having a pickup crash through the wall was a singular experience for her. Now and again a car will slide into the shop. The worst damage that’s done is punching a side-view mirror through a window.

She said she and her sister joked that their first day back they’d be competing with one another to work the north window and thus avoid the newly replaced south window.

“This is my first experience with a car accident of any kind,” she said. “You’d call this a car accident, right?”

But, really, she said, it hasn’t been tough going back to work. It can’t happen twice, can it?

And the community hasn’t been shy about helping her process it. All day, she said, people had been asking her about the crash.

“I’ve told the story a hundred times today already,” she said just before noon. And she’s fine with it. “That’s all that’s on my mind right now anyway.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.