A tragic accident shattered the normally placid setting at the Cliquot Club, 2929 E. 25th St., on the evening of Friday, Aug. 17.

At around 7:15 p.m., as diners filled the patio tables beside the building, a woman lost control of her truck, which plowed into the tables at around 30 miles an hour, according to witnesses. Police were unsure why the woman, who was reportedly unresponsive after the crash, lost control.

Two days after the crash, 68-year-old Jerome Perkins died of his injuries at Hennepin County Medical Center. A dozen other people were injured, but not seriously.

The café was closed for several days after the accident.

Karl Pearson-Cater was at one of the tables with his wife, Cindy, and their two boys, Noah, 5, and Sam, 2,when the accident occurred. The family had biked from their home on East 22nd Street and 31st Avenue South, Sam in a trailer and Noah newly free of training wheels. They chose a table next to the bike rack at the west end of the front of the restaurant, so they didn’t have to bother with the one lock they’d brought.

Suddenly, the white Ford Ranger pickup truck passed between a stop sign and a telephone pole and into the patio tables, taking out one table after the next. The truck reached the Pearson-Cater family last, tossing Cindy and Sam against their bikes on the bike rack. Karl was pushed away from the truck in the tangle of tables and chairs. He saw Cater scooped his son Noah up from on the ground under the bumper of the truck. He was not seriously injured.

Karl recalls the quick thinking of a passerby who reached into the car to remove the keys from the ignition. He saw that the truck’s driver didn’t move. She was motionless, which struck him as odd. He helped a woman stuck in the restaurant’s door inside.

“Noah and Sam were hysterical,” Karl recalls. “There was no calming them down.” Noah mistook the spilled chocolate milk on their clothes for blood. Cindy and Karl wanted to get the kids away from the scene. They retreated to a nearby house, where police found them later and convinced them to get Noah, whose jaw was rapidly becoming swollen, to Hennepin County Medical Center. He was taken there on a backboard, but he checked out okay, Karl said.

As traumatic as the experience was, Karl said the death of a fellow diner made his families’ ordeal seem insignificant. “I feel for that family,” he said. “It’s a sad, sad story.”

last revised: August 23, 2007

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