OXNARD : Car Slams Into Dental Office, No One Hurt

It was an appointment that couldn’t wait. But Pauline Nocks drove into the wrong office.

The 76-year-old Oxnard woman was picking up medication for her Shih Tzu Thursday morning at the Oxnard Village shopping center when she accidentally rammed her 1968 Chevy Chevelle into a dentist’s waiting room.

As Nocks parked her car, she accidentally hit the accelerator, jumped the curb and smashed her coupe through the glass-walled waiting room of dentist Francisco J. Rayas, located next to the veterinary clinic, police said.

The car, which narrowly missed the office’s door, splattered glass, threw four office chairs into the air and ran smack into the reception counter.

The car stopped just short of an office plant, a wall of files--and the office manager, Sylvia Loera , who had just left her reception post to aid in a teeth cleaning. It did, however, take out a big chunk of wall.

The waiting room was empty and there were no injuries. A patient, who normally would have been sitting right in front of the window, arrived late--minutes after the accident.

“I had just barely picked up the suction tip, and boom,” Loera said. “We thought it was an earthquake.”

Rayas, Loera and their patient--still wearing his bib--ran out to the waiting room to find an uninjured elderly woman sitting inside a running car, which was not damaged. She was wearing her seat belt.

“She was too nervous to back up,” Loera said.