Car crashes into North Merrick nail salon, injuring 2 workers

Two nail workers were hurt Saturday afternoon in North Merrick after two drivers got into a collision and one of their cars crashed into a salon, according to the Nassau County Police Department.

The workers' legs were injured, the department wrote in a news release, and they were treated at a nearby hospital.

The crash happened at about 12:10 p.m. when a 24-year-old woman driving a Dodge Charger eastbound on Jerusalem Avenue struck a Jeep Cherokee being driven by a 71-year-old woman who was driving southbound toward Ott Lane while leaving a parking lot and trying to cross over the avenue, the release said.

The younger woman "lost control and struck multiple parked cars then crashed" into Queen Bee Nail Salon, at 1377 Jerusalem Ave., the release said.

The workers are both 40-year-old women. The drivers refused medical treatment, the release said.

The release didn't provide a cause of the crash, who had the right of way, or how fast the drivers were traveling, but it said that no criminality is suspected.

In the aftermath on Saturday, workers were sweeping up glass in the shop at around 2:15 p.m., next to a mangled metal window frame and a broken brick wall. The remains of the lamp pole lay on the sidewalk nearby.

“I was so, so scared,” said Ivy Xu, the owner of Queen Bee.

Rae Rodriguez, who works at Studio Pink, a salon next door to Queen Bee, said she was sitting near the window when she heard “a loud screech.”

“I turned around, I just seen that a blue car, like a bullet shoot this way — really, really fast,” she said. The sedan crashed into Rodriguez’s parked car, totaling it, she said. 

Xu said that no customers were inside at the time of the crash.

Melady Acosta, a worker at Express Seafood, a neighboring business, said a car crash happens “every month” at the intersection of Jerusalem Avenue and Midian Street.

Acosta said she thinks the intersection needs a traffic light.

“Every Saturday, there’s kids on bikes, families walking dogs,” she said. “Look at her [Xu’s] nail shop — destroyed!” Acosta said.

Saturday’s crash was at least the second involving a driver losing control and crashing into a nail salon on Long Island this year.

In June, an allegedly drunken driver careened into a nail salon in Deer Park, killing three nail salon personnel and a customer, and injuring nine other people. That driver has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Drivers crash into commercial buildings and related structures over 100 times per day in the United States, causing an estimated 16,000 injuries and over 2,600 deaths, according to the Storefront Safety Council.