Just after midnight on Saturday morning, a student crashed his car into the second-story entrance to the Nemerov residence hall on the South 40.

Katie Ehrlich | Student Life

A student-owned vehicle crashes into Nemerov House. The vehicle became wedged between the residential hall and the top of the Shepley parking garage just after midnight on Saturday morning.

The student, who, according to witnesses at the scene, may have been inebriated, was driving a white Toyota minivan. He apparently drove off of the Shepley parking garage onto the balcony, where he remained parked for some time before driving forward, shattering his rear windshield.

The driver fled the scene on foot, but was apprehended by Washington University Police Department officers on Wydown Blvd. approximately an hour after the incident, having been identified by his father—the owner of the vehicle—in addition to closed-circuit television footage of the scene.

According to Chief of Police Don Strom, the driver admitted to having driven the vehicle, and then was transferred to a local hospital to receive medical attention.

“It was clear to our officers on the scene on Wydown that he appeared intoxicated, but that was about an hour afterwards, but you’ve got to make your own assumptions based on where the vehicle was,” Strom said.

Strom said the driver’s name could not be released as he hadn’t been formally charged.

Anjana Rajan, a sophomore who had been returning to Nemerov with a few friends who lived there at the time of the incident, witnessed the aftermath of the crash.

“We just see this white van pulled up all the way onto the balcony, where his front door, if opened all the way, would basically touch the [Nemerov] door. His windows were opened all the way and he had on a blank stare, so I asked him ‘Dude, are you okay?’ and he just blankly opened the door and picked up what looked like a tiny rock by his shoes and threw it on the ground, and closed the door and kept facing forward,” Rajan said.

Rajan and her friends called a former RA to report what they had seen, returning about 15 minutes later. They saw that the car had moved forward, hitting a column and shattering the back window.

A female student on a level below was showered with the broken glass from the rear windshield, but declined medical attention at the time, according to Strom.

Washington University Police officers allegedly had to push the car off of the balcony back onto the parking garage, as the tow truck couldn’t be brought onto the balcony.