By Clarence Cromwell
A Saratoga man died March 22 after suffering a heart attack at the wheel of his van, veering across a field on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road and plowing into a house
The county coroner's office identified the man as 55-year-old electronics engineer Allen Foster of Saratoga.
Jerry and Pat Wald were in the bedroom of their Chalet Lane house at 5:30 a.m., just waking up, when they heard Foster's van ram the fence that separates their back yard from Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. Then they heard what they thought was a bomb: It was the van crashing through their sliding glass door and an adjoining wall.
"The house shook," Pat Wald said.
When the Walds ran into their living room the van was partly inside, pushing the remains of their living-room furniture against the wall opposite the one it crashed through. The van's engine continued to run. The furniture in front of the van and a single concrete step that caught its back tires kept the van from continuing into the house. The crash snapped a joist that held up the ceiling and sprayed broken glass into the house.
A Saratoga Fire District engine and an ambulance answered a 911 call from the Walds, but Foster didn't respond to CPR.
Foster died from the heart attack, not from injuries suffered in the accident, a coroner's spokesman later said.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, April 3, 1996.
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