1 hurt when pickup truck crashes into Greensburg house

At first, Charles Colarusso thought he heard a bolt of lightning.

But when the front of his house was ripped off Friday afternoon just feet away from where he was sitting in his living room, the Greensburg man realized it wasn’t a storm, but a pickup truck.

He came outside and saw the truck wedged into the front of his house. The driver, who is a longtime acquaintance of Colarusso’s, was taken away by ambulance, he said.

“I can’t even live here,” Colarusso said.

He and two of his grandsons were cleaning up the debris Saturday morning while passersby stopped to chat. The crash damaged a bathroom and a closet.

“What happened, Chuck?” one driver asked.

“Somebody decided to go through the house,” Colarusso replied.

The driver told Colarusso he swerved to miss hitting a small dog when he first crashed into a nearby utility pole and then careened into the two-story house. The pole was replaced Friday, Colarusso said.

He has lived there for 35 years and said nothing like that had ever happened before.

“It could be worse,” Colarusso said. “It scared the living heck out of me, I know that.”

A roof over the damaged portion was being held up by support beams while yellow caution tape surrounded the debris on the sidewalk.

It was at least the second time this week that a motorist crashed into a home in Westmoreland County. On Wednesday, the driver of a black BMW apparently failed to negotiate a curve on Willow Crossing Road and drove through a line of hedges and slammed into a brick home. No serious injuries were reported.