Fairburn parents are relieved that her children were upstairs in a timeout. It may have saved their lives.
A neighbor's SUV plowed into the family's home Monday night, right into the room where her children had been watching TV minutes before, Rahim Shepherd told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The neighbor apparently lost control while backing out of his driveway.
"Every time I look at the living room, I'm like ‘wow, that could've been the children,'" Shepherd said.
Shepherd had sent his four children upstairs because they didn't clean up the living room, he said.
His wife, Zaynab Tracy-Shepherd, said she had gone upstairs after the children and was talking to her husband and "I hear what sounds like a bomb; it sounds like war in the living room. And we just jumped up and I was like ‘oh my God the kids ... and I saw all four of my kids at one time. "
When she realized what had happened, she told her husband, "there's an SUV in the damn living room ... I started crying, I was just a mess.
"He said ‘come on, get out, get out of the house' because the engine was still going and we didn't know if it was going to blow up ... and then we realized it was the neighbor because he was getting out of his car coming toward us to make sure the kids were safe ... and he was looking like he was out of it because he couldn't believe what happened. ... You know everybody was safe so I just have to count the blessings right then and there."
"I’m grateful that everybody’s alive and well," her husband said, looking at the devastation in his living room and kitchen. "These things are replaceable. We even feel sorry for the driver."
Tracy-Shepherd said she was hoping the landlord's insurance would compensate them for lodging because "as it stands, we can't stay."
Her daughter, Tamir Frazier, summed up the situation as only a 10-year-old could: "Annoying."
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