KANNAPOLIS — Employees and customers getting Christmas coifs at a north Kannapolis salon got a hair-raising experience when a Salisbury man parked his car inside the business on Friday.
Two women were taken to NorthEast Medical Center, one for an injured arm and another for an injury to her hip, Kannapolis Police Officer D. Josey said.
Robert Nolan Heilig, 61, of 3005 Airport Road, Salisbury, was parked outside the Hair Reflections salon at 2801 N. Cannon Blvd. at about 12:30 p.m. waiting for his wife, Carolyn, who was getting her hair done.
Parked across the parking lot from the building, Heilig decided to move his car to a space directly in front of the salon entrance when a space came open, Josey said.
But instead of stopping when he pulled his 1986 Buick LeSabre into the space, Heilig kept going, right through the front of the building.
“He said he thought he was pressing the brake, but it turned out to be the gas pedal,”Josey said.
Heilig’s car, accelerating until he removed his foot from the gas, ripped an 8-foot-wide hole in the front of the corrugated aluminum building, taking out the glass door and part of the wall beside it.
He plowed through the waiting area, knocking out part of a wall separating the area from the working space, and veered to the right, toward employees and customers in three booths.
“We were just working, and we thought the wind had blown the door out,” hairdresser Barbara Wise said. “We looked up and a car came by ... It scared everybody to death.”
The car, which left black marks as its tires spun on the slick tile floor, missed by a few feet driving straight into a group of eight dryers where women sat drying their hair.
Had he veered to the left, Heilig would have headed for twice as many booths. With eight employees working and 10 customers in the shop at the time, many were occupied.
Wise was working in the second booth on the right. She and her mother-in-law, who was waiting to get her hair done, became trapped in the booth by the car and the partition walls it knocked out.
Another employee, Sherry McDaniels, had just walked out of her booth in the front of the salon when Heilig’s car came through and hit her. It pushed her nearly to the back wall, Wise said, injuring her left arm. Doctors were still taking X-rays Friday evening and had not concluded whether it was broken.
The car stopped with the back end about 15 feet from the front wall, police said. The front of the car was in the third booth, where Heilig’s wife was sitting in a chair getting her hair done. She fainted.
Heilig’s LeSabre pushed a partition into Judy Cress, who was in the booth with Carolyn Heilig, and hurt her hip. Cress also went to NorthEast Medical Center.
Josey said he couldn’t say whether Heilig would be charged until he completed an investigation. But he said that Heilig wasn’t doing anything “reckless or dangerous” when the accident occurred.
“I felt so sorry for that man,” said Ruth Wise, Barbara Wise’s mother-in-law. “He was just shaking.”
Two hours after the accident, a group of men swept up glass, debris and Christmas decorations from around the gaping cavity in the front of the business and the booths.
And despite the cold air pouring in, several employees, along with a few customers intent on getting their holiday hairdos, remained — at the very back of the shop.
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