A misguided pickup truck that struck the optometry offices owned by Dr. Fred Stellhorn Wednesday night caused up to $75,000 in damage to an examination room and a loss of equipment.

Stellhorn noted that the crash caused by an allegedly inebriated driver was the second to occur in six weeks to his building in the 100 block of North Fremont Avenue.  On Feb. 9 at about 11 p.m. a motorist who had been eastbound on Center Street plowed into the office of Dr. Trang Duong, DDS, practicing in orthodontics.  Her front wall, an inside wall, carpeting and furnishings in the lobby had to be replaced.

Duong, like Stellhorn, was called by officers to come to the accident scene late at night to view the destruction of their offices.  Stellhorn had been in bed for nearly two hours Wednesday night when the phone call awakened him with an officer saying a pickup truck had driven through the front wall of his office and was actually in one of his eye exam rooms.

She said she was grateful to the firefighters who boarded up the gaping hole in her front wall that night.

“It gives us a chance to regroup,” Stellhorn said of the damage.  “Our patients are wonderful and caring with many of them calling us this morning.  We did not cancel anyone’s appointment – it just gives us a new challenge.”

The eye doctor said everyone on his staff stepped up to the plate and they manned brooms in the parking lot first thing Thursday morning.

In the February incident that saw a car crash into the adjacent dental suite, a video camera was in operation and captured the event.  Duong said the video showed the car ramming an inside wall in her lobby area and then recorded the driver backing out of the building and driving off.  A witness reported seeing the motorist drive out the parking lot at a high rate of speed and turn down Stewart Street half a block away that parallels Yosemite Avenue.

Marissa Candace Pimentel, 28, of Tracy was later arrested on a hit and run charge after she reported her Chevrolet Blazer had been stolen.  Officers had located the car in the 700 block of Stewart Street, around the corner from the dental office on Fremont Avenue.  The car had sustained major damage to the front of the vehicle and to the roof.

Witnesses were located at a nearby apartment complex connected with that parking lot who identified Pimentel as the woman they saw behind the wheel of the vehicle with front end damage sitting in the lot on Stewart Street following the crash into the optometry office.