Cooperage Inn open for business after car crashes into building Thursday night

Cooperage Inn is open today for lunch and dinner as usual, despite the motor vehicle accident last night that destroyed its main entryway.

Workers from Owen Construction of Calverton have been on site all morning repairing damage to the doorway and Wm. J. Mills & Co. Awnings is repairing the entrance canopy.

The main entrance should be reopened in time for dinner tonight, manager Scott Hopkins said this morning. Meanwhile, guests can use the tap room entrance.

A diner who’d just left the Sound Avenue restaurant last night crashed into a parked car while attempting to back out of a parking space on the east side of the restaurant’s parking lot.

“He hit the car behind him pretty hard, and then he put the car in drive and gunned the accelerator, driving up onto and across the lawn, curving to the right and drove directly into the entrance,” according to Hopkins, who said he’d reviewed the restaurant’s surveillance cameras’ recordings.

“Then he put it in reverse and drove backwards along the same path, just as fast,” Hopkins said, shaking his head and pointing to the vehicle’s path of destruction through the landscaping that had lined the brick walkway. The driver backed into a tree “hard enough to knock it over,” uprooting it. That’s where the vehicle, a 2006 Mercedes Benz finally came to a rest.

“He just missed two women who had just exited the building,” Hopkins said. They were approaching the parking lot on the walkway, and when they saw the Mercedes crash into a car, they ran back toward the door. But then the Mercedes came full steam ahead, right at the spot where they’d sought refuge. Again, they ran for cover.

The two women were dining at the restaurant with the driver of the car, whom police identified as 70-year-old Harold Adamo, of Fort Salonga. He’d left the restaurant a few minutes ahead of them, apparently to get the car. His two teenage grandsons were with him and were riding in the Mercedes when the accident happened, Hopkins said.

“It was quite a scene.”

Adamo was not charged in the incident, which police said last night is still under investigation.

The Riverhead fire marshal responded to investigate the structural integrity of the building and cleared it to remain open.

The restaurant’s custom-made wood and glass entry door was destroyed in the accident, Hopkins said. It lay in ruins on the grass outside the main entrance this morning, removed from its hinges by contractors working to rebuild the door frame. “It’s a shame. It was such a beautiful door — and very expensive,” he said, shaking his head. The vestibule and everything in it, including the ATM machine, was “messed up,” he said.

“But nobody got hurt. That was very fortunate and that’s really all that matters.”

Last night’s car-into-building crash was the third in as many weeks in Riverhead. An SUV plowed into the Pizza Hut restaurant on the Route 58 traffic circle on May 15. A car crashed into the entrance of the North Shore Christian Church on Kroemer Avenue on May 20.