‘It was like I was standing on top of the car,’ woman says after car hit Fernwood house

A pregnant Autumn Hill had just put on her coat as her 8-year-old daughter, Zoey, played with some crayons on the floor Thursday evening.

Seconds later: a boom, the house shuddered and the wood floor beneath mother and daughter cracked open and tilted up.

What Hill didn’t know at the time was a car had crashed into the Far South Side home, missing them by inches as it plunged into the basement beneath their feet.

“It was like I was standing on top of the car at one point, and then I had to hurry up and get (Zoey) because it started collapsing,” Hill said Friday afternoon standing outside the house in Chicago’s Fernwood neighborhood.

Only daylight showed the true extent of the devastation after a police chase ended with the teenage driver of a suspected stolen car slamming into the house in the 10200 block of Wentworth Avenue, where Hill’s mother and grandmother lived.

The front living room where Hill and her daughter had been standing looked like a partially collapsed cardboard box with one side torn away. Shattered timber and bits of wall insulation lay amid couches and toppled bookshelves. The sound of gushing water could be heard coming from somewhere inside a house with a certain fate: Demolition.

Stefano Esposito/Sun-Times

Hill, 25, who lives in Hyde Park, was back at the home Friday morning hauling possessions through the undamaged rear portion of the home.

“A least we’ll have a little bit of clothes, a little bit of stuff to work with,” said Hill, as friends and family carried our bulging garbage bags of possessions, televisions, an electric wheelchair.

Officers tried to stop a vehicle for a traffic violation about 7:20 p.m. Thursday near the intersection of 102nd Street and Wentworth Avenue when it took off, then hit the house, Chicago police Sgt. Rocco Alioto said.

The 17-year-old boy who was driving was pronounced dead at the scene, officials said.

A 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl who were riding in the vehicle were both taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, where their conditions were stabilized.

Police said the vehicle was reported stolen Tuesday from the 2000 block of East 95th Street, police said.

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability has been notified of the crash because the fatality happened during a police pursuit, Alioto said.

Contributing: Sun-Times Wire, Tom Schuba