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Police: Woman Crashes Into House, Rams Estranged Husband

Posted at 7:32 PM, Apr 01, 2013
and last updated 2013-04-01 19:34:28-04

KALAMAZOO, Mich– The damage was still visible Morning afternoon after police say a woman went after her estranged husband with a car.

It all unfolded around 12:30 Saturday morning in the 2900 block of McKinley Street, that’s in Kalamazoo County’s Cooper Township.

The Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department says the woman showed up where her husband was staying and rammed into the house and him, more than once. The victim, 27-year-old Matt Holtman shared his story of what happened Monday with Fox 17.

“The only thing that stopped me from dying was that concrete” as Holtman pointed to the front porch. It’s still hard to put into words for him, that his 22-year-old estranged wife who he has a 2-year-old son with could do this.

“She came over and kept wanting to talk to me and I kept ignoring her, telling her I didn’t want to talk.” Holtman says they’ve been married for 3 years but recently broke up, they’ve still been talking and he says she was mad because she thought he was seeing someone else.

“Me and my friends walked outside tried to convince her to leave and we walked inside and we heard this huge crash and we all walked out the door and she smashed into the front porch.”

When Holtman ran out there he says “she rammed me and I started running and I ran up the porch try to get up it. She smashed me at the last second and finished smashing me up the porch and I jumped up.”

But it doesn’t end there, “for some reason I decided to rush the car again and she smashed me again all the way into the garage, through the garage door. She backed up to hit me a third time and luckily my buddy was there. He helped pick me up out the rubble and get me back onto the porch.”

That’s when police say she took off down the street, neighbors say she had to be going close to 100mph when she crashed into some trees. Deputies believe it was in attempt to take her own life.

Janice Newkarn who lives nearby said “a few other neighbors heard the noise came out and heard her screaming for help. Now if it would have been maybe a couple of hours after that nobody would have heard her because people would have been asleep. You know my husband would have heard the noise in the woods but nothing out here so she may not have made it.”

Holtman says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, “I’m supposed to talk to the prosecutor and decide exactly what charges I want to file against her, which is hard in itself.”

The woman was hospitalized for serious injuries, we did reach out to her to get her side of the story but she didn’t want to talk. She has not yet been charged.