VIDEO: SUV crashes into Lakewood apartment near busy shopping centre

It started out as a quiet morning  for Walid Khalid and his wife Rameesa Nasir, who live in a ground-floor apartment building in the 300 Block of Herold Road in Saskatoon’s Lakewood neighbourhood.

Khalid had just woken up and went into his living room, when the couple heard a loud crash. Their apartment is next to the building’s stairwell. “I looked inside my apartment, nothing was wrong, but when I tried to open my main door, I couldn’t open it,” he said.

Khalid then ran out of his apartment through a second entrance and found a silver Lexus SUV had crashed into the building. The entire body of the vehicle had come to rest inside the side entrance next to the stairs. “This entrance is used by many kids when they come back from school… my first thought was maybe someone was standing there,” Khalid said.

A scary situation for residents at a Saskatoon apartment complex earlier today. I spoke with resident Walid Khalid, who lives next to the crash site. Video by @AlexBrownYXE ⁦@CKOMNews⁩ pic.twitter.com/udVC1LxwiB

— Lara Fominoff (@LaraFominoff) May 17, 2024

Khalid went into the hole created by the crash and found an elderly woman inside the vehicle. He immediately called 911. “I knocked on the window and she gave a thumbs up. She was doing O.K.,” he said.

“If the car was five feet to the right , it would have been in my apartment, and I would have been on the bed at the time,” Khalid added.

Saskatoon Police cordoned off the area, as firefighters worked to get the vehicle out of the building with a tow truck, while also reinforcing the walls.

Khalid said living on the ground floor of the building across from the shopping centre, had worried him in the past. “I think they should be having some kind of safety measures installed, especially in front of apartment buildings,” he said.

Walid Khalid and Rameesa Nasir woke to an SUV next door, inside their apartment builiding in Lakewood. (Lara Fominoff /650 CKOM)

Residents living near the site of the crash on the first couple of floors of the apartment building have been told to stay out while a structural assessment is completed.

Erin Sloboda lives in an apartment behind the shopping centre. Her doorbell camera caught the crash on video.

“You can see a van leaving the parking lot across from the grocery store, and then you can see an SUV exit the parking lot of the grocery store at a very high speed. It does not stop, it does not slow down, it crashes right into the apartment building,” she described.

The investigation into the crash is continuing. After a structural analysis was done, residents were allowed back into their homes Friday afternoon.