Iowa trucker Roger Meinerts was the only customer inside the Hat Six Travel Center in Evansville early Sunday when a van fleeing police crashed through the front doors and plowed straight through the building.
Meinerts said he was standing at the counter waiting for the cashier to count his change just seconds before the impact.
“It took her a little bit to count it out,” Meinerts said. “Once she gave it to me, I put it in my pocket, turned around, and heard this van smash right into that door.”
He remembered standing like a “deer in headlights” before hearing three popping sounds.
“I thought, ‘Holy smokes, is that guns or what is that?’” Meinerts said. “I don't know that it was. It probably wasn't. It was probably structural.”
Whatever the noise was, Meinerts said it scared him enough that he ran to the other side of the store and sheltered behind some shelving.
Then, he said, the driver stepped on the gas again, barreling farther into the store and through to the other side of the building.
“He went in one side by the diesel pumps, and he came out the other side by the gas pumps,” Meinerts said.
'You Are Not Going To Believe This'
Tyler Berlinger said the trouble began when the white Ford shuttle-style van came up behind his pickup, tailgating him as he drove toward Poison Spider Road and Robertson Road. This was early Sunday morning, around 3 a.m.
At one point, he said, the van forced him over a curb. Berlinger watched it almost crash twice and called nonemergency dispatch.
“I have a family,” he said. “So I called him in and didn't want him hurting anybody.”
Berlinger said the van later stopped on Robertson Road. When Berlinger began to get out of his pickup, he said the driver put the van in reverse and began backing toward him, forcing Berlinger to reverse to get away.
He then watched the van run the red light at Robertson Road and CY Avenue, Berlinger said.
Berlinger said he backed off at the dispatcher's direction, but the van made a U-turn across the median and again came close to the back of his pickup.
By then, dispatch had told him that a deputy was waiting near CY Avenue and Wyoming Boulevard.
Berlinger pulled into the Honda dealership parking lot and watched as a Natrona County sheriff's deputy got behind the white van and activated the patrol vehicle's lights and siren, he said.
By the time Berlinger pulled back onto CY Avenue, the deputy and van were already about a half-mile away near Smith's.
Berlinger said he didn't see what happened next. It wasn't until the following morning when he happened to stop at Hat Six that he saw the wrecked white van and recognized it as the same one he'd reported.
He immediately called his wife.
“You are not going to believe this,” he told her.
'Bunch of Cops' Hollering
The spot where Meinerts had been standing moments earlier to collect his change was nearly flattened.
Once the vehicle cleared the far side of the building, he said he walked back to the counter to see what could have been his final footprint.
“I kind of slowly went up to where I was standing after he had exited the building,” Meinerts said. “And all of a sudden, it didn't take hardly any time at all, there was a bunch of cops there hollering, ‘Get down! Get on your knees! Get down!’”
Meinerts said that he realized later that the van had become stuck in a far wall of the building and the driver had exited the car and reentered the building.
“I never saw him inside the building, but I would have been 20 feet away from him,” Meinerts said.
Then just seconds later, Meinerts said he watched as the driver was arrested.
“The cops found him there,” Meinerts said. “They got him on his chest and handcuffed him and sat him down there.”
In the aftermath, he walked back through the store, recording the destruction on his phone.
He said that glass from the shattered windows and display cases crunched under his feet as he threaded past overturned displays and scattered stock.
A trail of wet tire tracks could be seen running clear across the floor, tracing the path straight to where the van had jammed in the far wall, out of the camera’s view.
“My wife is never going to believe this,” Meinerts said in the video.
Feet away, police surrounded the suspect as he sat on the ground in handcuffs, hysterical and rambling unintelligibly.
In Meinerts' video, the man can be heard exclaiming frantically to officers, “I’m not making this up, that’s why I did this, I swear on my life.”
Meinerts said the rambling was just as incoherent in person.
“He did say something about drugs and he did say something about the interstate,” Meinerts said. “I don’t know what the complete sentences were with that.”
Before he started recording, Meinerts said that several police officers had knees on the suspect’s back struggling to handcuff him, which is also something he heard the suspect yelling about afterward.
“He was complaining that his shoulder hurt,” Meinerts said.
The Evansville Police Department did not respond to Cowboy State Daily by publication.
‘Things Can Be Replaced, People Cannot’
As he recorded the aftermath, Meinerts' hands were shaking, adding that the crew at the truck stop were shaken as well.
“The help was scared and hysterical, like they should be,” Meinerts said. “It was quite an eye-opener. Something I’ve never had before, and I'll never forget it.”
Hat Six owner Tiffany Gamble told Cowboy State Daily on Monday that despite the extent of the damage, the van managed to miss structural elements of the building.
“The one thing I am very grateful for is that no one was hurt, which is really crazy,” Gamble said.
“While the damage is unfortunate, buildings can be repaired and things can be replaced,” Hat Six wrote in a statement after the crash. “People cannot.”
The crash happened at about 3:40 a.m., Gamble said. Less than 12 hours later, Hat Six was back in operation.
Outside contractors were needed only to install temporary doors, she said. Hat Six employees handled the rest — clearing damaged products, cleaning the floors and tackling what Gamble described simply as broken glass being “everywhere.”
“It was absolutely incredible that everyone was willing to just pitch in and do what it took to get us back up and running,” she said.
Gamble said nothing like it has happened at Hat Six before.
Semis have struck buildings and trailers sometimes take out canopies in the travel-center industry, she said, but a 14-passenger van going through a travel center is another matter.
She even called someone else in the industry afterward to tell him what had happened.
“He could not believe that a 14-passenger van went through our entire facility,” Gamble said. “He said, ‘Well, you have me beat on that one.’”
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com and Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
