Woman drives her Caddy through island shoe store

Talk about a doorbuster.

A 66-year-old Bainbridge woman drove her car through the front window of a shoe store in Island Village Shopping Center just after 11 a.m. Wednesday, May 30.

There were no reported injuries.

The woman had pulled her car, a 2016 Cadillac SRX, into a parking space outside the shop, and then drove forward onto the curb and through the front window.

She insisted she had not accelerated, adding that the car was new to her.

The shoe store was not the first shop in the shopping center to be struck by a car. As previously reported by the Review: The car-vs.-building crash is an almost comically common aspect of Bainbridge Island culture.

From Jan. 1, 2013 through Dec. 31, 2016 there were at least 12 incidents of a car striking a building or storefront on Bainbridge, according to reports obtained through a public records request by the Review — an average of one every three months (2017 has not yet been examined).

Of those, only one was the end result of a collision with another car. The other 11 were classic “car vs. building” incidents, wherein the person behind the wheel drove over a divider or sidewalk, or backed into the structure, unassisted, typically while pulling into or out of a parking space or idling there with their foot on the brake but not actually having shifted into park.

There were two such incidents in 2013, four in 2014, three in 2015 and two in 2016, according to police reports.

Only one involved a driver striking their own property.

No injuries, to the driver or anyone else, were reported in any of these incidents.