Athens truck crash shuts down East Broad St, damages building

As we continue on here at 2 o'clock, so a police response shut down part of East Broad Street in downtown Athens today between College Avenue and North Thomas Street. Our reporter Ana is live in Athens with the latest. And Ray, this is kind of I can kind of see it behind you. There's some damage to a building. What can you tell us? Yeah, so Tyler, behind us is an old historic building. We talked to the owner of Magnolia's Bar off-camera earlier today, and he says that this building right here, this was built in 1889. And this damage that you can see is stretching from the bottom floor all the way up to the third floor and actually has a window kind of hanging from the second floor right now, just hanging onto the facade right now. This was caused by a vehicle, a pickup truck that we have learned crashed into... The side of this building in early morning hours. What Athens-Clarke County police have told us is that at about 7.20, 7.30 this morning, officers were responding to a call about two blocks away at Jackson and Washington streets to reports of a suicidal man. Officers did respond to that call. They made contact with that man, but the man fled in a vehicle. And then moments later, that's when this crash occurred. The Athens-Clarke County Police, they've identified him, identified this man. We are only going to say he is 46 years old just due to the nature of what happened here and because this involved somebody with potential suicidal ideations. So we're going to leave that at that. But this is a... Kind of the story, what we've been hearing from people who are in Athens is that Magnolias is a very popular bar. Thank you very much. A lot of people have called it shorthand for mags. That's usually on the bottom floor, and on the top floor is the Republic Salon. That's a salon that's on the third floor, so you have two businesses that are going to be down for a while, and police have closed off East Broad Street, as you mentioned at the top, Tyler, because they are trying to make sure that this structure is remaining sound, and they do have to do some shoring up, as the police told me. Now, I want to play a little clip here from students and people that we've talked to in Athens, because for some people, this is hitting hard for them. And very close to home. Take a listen. It definitely hits pretty close to home for me, just because it's, I don't know, I frequently think that, like, you know, a couple choices could be different, and there's not, there's only a few... Choices, options, situations really separating any of us from one another I don't know. and any any path that we choose to go down and so I think that's very very unfortunate. Thank you for watching it. You know I also think that it's a symptom of like a much larger problem just because I feel like mental health in general is really really bad these days. Yeah, so Tyler, that's kind of like some of the sentiment that we're getting here in Athens is that this is just spotlighting mental health awareness, just seeing what happened in the devastation. This has been left behind not only for the family, but for this historic building. You can see that the city, it looks like they've brought in more barricades for this part of Athens. So it just shows the extended nature of the closure that's happening here in downtown Athens. Now the owner of Magnolia's and the general manager, they have started a GoFundMe account to help cover the loss of some of the damages. Right now, they have their goal set at $250,000. Tyler, we'll have a link to that eventually on fox5atlanta.com. Yeah, certainly a sad story, and we'll be looking for that link on fox5atlanta.com and the Fox Local at Rayana live in Athens. I appreciate your time, Ray, and thanks so much for giving us an update. We'll be checking in with you a little bit later on this afternoon.