SILVER STRAND : Driver Held After Hitting Building

Edwina Brown couldn’t help but hear the high-pitched squeal of a skidding vehicle that seemed to go on forever outside the Artgodz gallery that she manages in Silver Strand.

Looking out the window, gallery owner Jeff Bradford jumped up and turned white. “Call 911!” Bradford shouted just as a collision rocked the Oxnard building like an earthquake.

Downstairs, a man later identified as a suspected drunk driver had just plowed his four-wheel-drive truck into a ground-floor storage room, leaving more than 300 feet of skid marks behind him on Victoria Avenue.

California Highway Patrol investigators estimated that Ian Paul Janis of Oxnard was driving between 75 and 90 m.p.h. when he failed to negotiate a dogleg curve in the main roadway leading to the beach community. Janis was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving.

A crowd of several hundred spectators gathered, drawn by the sickening sound of screeching brakes followed by a crash. “It sounded like a locomotive train from hell,” Brown recalled Thursday, a day after the crash.

But to Victoria Reed, the collision was nearly predictable, since it was the fourth time that a suspected drunk driver had slammed a car into the building since she bought it in 1984.

When county traffic officials failed to take action after the previous incidents, Reed installed three steel posts filled with concrete in front of the shop. In Wednesday’s collision, Janis drove his truck over the middle post and into a former garage that now serves as a storage room.

Janis, 26, attempted to back his truck out of the garage but the post prevented it, Brown said.

Reed said she is convinced that without the posts, Janis would have gone through the building and out the back, like the driver a few years ago who drove a car through the garage and took out a staircase.

After that accident, Reed said, the owner of a second-floor escrow company used a rope ladder to get to work until repairs were finished.

Reed said that unless the county figures out a way to reduce the danger at the intersection, she has little choice but to install larger posts to help protect her building.

“It’s damn frustrating,” she said.