If Wahlgren hadn't checked his email around 3:20 a.m. on Jan. 12, the 22-year-old would have been asleep in a futon at his parents' Cypress Way home—lying right where a gray Pontiac Grand Am careened through the wall before coming to rest squarely in the center of the Wahlgrens' living room.

Wahlgren was still awake because he had been playing drinking games with his brother, Steve, and the two of them, along with Steve's girlfriend, Leanne Steadman, had all decided to go to bed around 3 a.m.

After turning on the TV to watch Nick at Nite, Matt Wahlgren sat down to check his email and had just turned the

computer on before the car busted in. He said he remembers thinking the house was collapsing.

"After the car, I remember everything getting really dark," Wahlgren said.

"Yeah, because the TV was gone!" added Steadman, laughing.

After the accident, both said it went silent in the house, save for the sound of the car's engine fan still running, before the boys shut the car off.

The driver of the car, identified by an identification tag left on the scene as Kip Cogswell, was unconscious, slumped over the steering wheel. According to a police report, he had fallen asleep at the wheel after working a late shift and lost control of his vehicle.

The front wall of the family's 53-year-old, two-bedroom house is now boarded up, as is a wall on the other side of the living room. Between the two sits a massive pile of rubble, containing an entertainment center, yearbooks, a coffee table and the futon Wahlgren would have been sleeping on.

"Everything in the room was under the car," Matt Wahlgren said. "Except me obviously, and a couple little things."

The only section of the room not hit was where Wahlgren was sitting. The desk that held his laptop still stands, unscathed.

"Matthew's little sanctity in the corner of the living room was the only thing that didn't get hit," said his father.

Aside from their son, the Wahlgren family also avoided losing an antique oil lamp that has been in their family for four generations.

"We dragged that lamp all over the place for years so it wouldn't break," Clay Wahlgren, Matt's father, said. "That thing was as fragile as an eggshell."

His brother, Steve, asleep in his neighboring room, was also affected when the car smashed through the wall, pushing the bed he shared with Steadman almost 5 feet from the wall.

The family is finally beginning to settle down, but Julianna Wahlgren, Matt's mother, said her family still tenses up when there are noises that remind them of the accident, and some in the family are having trouble sleeping.

They are beginning to cart away the debris, and Clay Wahlgren plans to install poles or similar barriers in the front yard to prevent future collisions. He said he had already put a tree in the yard as part of a landscaping project, and a driver coming off of Wolfe Road hit it.

He said that the family will probably have to renovate parts of their home, but it will all be part of their effort to recover and move on from this accident.

And while the family laughs about what appears to be the lucky placement of a desk, they say they've seen hints that there could have been more familial intervention.

Amid the ruin of the living room, three stockings still hung on the mantle, one for each brother—Matt, Steve and Jeffrey, who died when Matt was only 10 years old. On the wall in the kitchen, where the impact of the wall knocked pictures down, a photo of Jeffrey still hangs.

And, the family found that a stand of photographs taken of the children when they were young had landed on the car's hood—on top, a photo of Matt and Jeffrey, both playing with plastic telephones.

"He was talking to me," Matt Wahlgren said.