Car crashes into Doral pet grooming shop, causing major damage

A car smashed into Leslie Pet Grooming near Northwest 52nd Street and 79th Avenue in Doral early Sunday, leaving a gaping hole in the front of the shop and forcing the small business to face thousands of dollars in repairs. No injuries were reported, and the owner said no animals were hurt.

Doral police told the owner the driver mistook the gas for the brake while backing into a parking space. After the car was towed away, the front side of the building was left badly damaged, and the owner estimated the loss at $15,000 to $20,000. It was still unclear whether any charges would be filed.

For a neighborhood pet grooming shop, the damage reaches beyond the storefront itself. Leslie Pet Grooming depends on a usable entrance, customer parking and a steady flow of drop-offs and pickups, and a collision that punches through the front wall can disrupt appointments until the structure is repaired and the space is safe again.

The Doral crash also fits a pattern South Florida has seen before. On June 13, 2012, a car crashed into The Grooming Post in a Margate strip mall on West Atlantic Boulevard, killing one person and injuring another. That case showed how a mistake in a parking lot can turn a routine maneuver into a deadly storefront crash.

The clearest prevention tools are physical barriers that keep a vehicle from reaching the building. Bollards, which are fixed posts placed to create a stand-off zone, are used to protect customers, workers and property, and some are crash-rated while others are not. The Storefront Safety Council, launched in 2017, was formed to work toward ending vehicle-into-building crashes, and the lesson for Miami-Dade property owners is straightforward: where parking spaces sit close to a storefront, added protection can keep a simple parking error from becoming a costly strike.