Crash damage fixed at Freestone bakery, re-opening Friday

Customers may notice things look a little different when the Wild Flour Bread Bakery reopens nearly three weeks after a car slammed into the front of the Bohemian Highway building.|

Freestone’s Wild Flour Bread bakery will open Friday, ending a nearly three-week closure after a car broke through the front façade of the popular west county business and injured six people.

The post-crash opening comes a little later than initially hoped for owner Jed Wallach, but was due to extensive repairs.

On Jan. 28 a would-be customer parking in front of the bakery hit the gas instead of the brake pedal, according to the CHP. The man’s BMW shot through the wall, striking some people and upending a table full of patrons before stopping before hitting the sales counter. One man suffered moderate injuries and others complained of pain.

The interior fixes were done as of Saturday night, Wallach said. Outside, a new row of metal poles filled with concrete now line the front, to stop vehicles from reaching the building.

“My greatest concern is to reassure staff and customers that the bakery is safe to enter,” Wallach said Monday.

“It’s great to feel like I’m going to get back to being a baker instead of a general contractor. I woke up the sourdough, I’m beginning to make dough,” he said. “It feels wonderful to see a bakery that is not only healed but is restored in such a way as to be stronger and essentially unchanged, visually.”

The bakery sits along Bohemian Highway in the village of Freestone, between Highway 12 and Occidental.

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