A Jeep Wrangler tore through the glass entrance of Tucker Duke's Lunchbox in Deerfield Beach on Wednesday morning, coming to rest inside the restaurant's dining room before the eatery had even opened for the day. Nobody was inside the building and nobody was hurt, according to restaurant representative John Cortez.
The Broward Sheriff's Office responded to the scene at 1101 South Powerline Road around 9:30 a.m., according to CBS News, which reported that the Jeep had crashed into the commercial building and ended up wedged inside the dining area. Cortez said he got a phone call that morning telling him to come to the restaurant because of an accident, and that the restaurant had not yet opened for the day when the crash happened.
Fire-rescue personnel who assessed the scene determined that the damage was primarily limited to the glass storefront, the outlet's report notes, and no structural damage was initially reported. Even so, the Deerfield Beach building department was requested to evaluate the affected property, a standard step following any vehicle-into-building incident. The exact circumstances that sent the Jeep through the entrance remain under investigation.
A Recurring Hazard for Storefronts Nationwide
Crashes like the one at Tucker Duke's Lunchbox are far more common than many diners realize. The Storefront Safety Council, which tracks these incidents nationally, says vehicles crash into commercial buildings and related structures more than 100 times a day in the United States, resulting in as many as 16,000 injuries and more than 2,600 fatalities annually, according to the Storefront Safety Council. The organization estimates that about 42% of these incidents involve at least one injury and 8% result in one or more fatalities.
Restaurants are disproportionately affected. Citing the same council's figures, The Charlotte Ledger reports that commercial buildings are hit by cars roughly 100 times a day on average, with restaurants accounting for about a quarter of those crashes. A review the outlet conducted found 182 injurious car crashes inside Southern restaurants between January 2016 and the day of a fatal crash in Wilson, North Carolina, with 15 of those crashes causing at least one fatality.
Deadly Precedents Elsewhere
The Wilson tragedy, cited in that same review, involved a 78-year-old driver who lost control of a Lincoln Aviator and crashed into a Hardee's, killing two brothers who were having breakfast there. The day after that crash, a 70-year-old driver in Raleigh mistook his Toyota's gas pedal for the brake and wrecked the outdoor deck of Rudino's Sports Corner, the Ledger's report states. Separately, the Storefront Safety Council's database notes that an Acura sedan slammed through the emergency room doors at St. David's North Austin Medical Center in Texas on Feb. 13, 2024.
Those incidents underscore why the Storefront Safety Initiative was launched by the council in 2017, aiming to address the persistent pattern of vehicles ending up where they don't belong. In Deerfield Beach, the outcome was far less severe: an empty dining room, a shattered storefront, and a restaurant waiting on building inspectors before it can fully reckon with what happened to its front door.
