LEWISTON – Sitting at his kitchen table chatting with a friend Wednesday night, Marc Cloutier was not expecting anyone to drop in. He certainly was not expecting a Chevrolet Lumina to come crashing through a wall right in front of him.

“We were just sitting there shooting the breeze. There’s a big crash and then there’s a car coming right through the wall,” said Cloutier, 43.

Cloutier was covered in blood after the 9 p.m. crash, but his injuries were minor, according to police at the scene. Cloutier said the impact forced the kitchen table back into the room and threw debris in his face, cutting him above the eye.

His friend, sitting inches away across the table, escaped the bizarre crash without a scratch. Cloutier’s wife was upstairs and his children were away when the car came crashing in.

The driver of the Lumina, 19-year-old Kristina Benson of Poland, was dazed but not hurt. Her car landed inside Cloutier’s house, roughly six feet above the ground. Benson told police she had fallen asleep while driving on Main Street near the Longley Bridge.

Samantha Spencer, 19, who was stopped at a red light while coming off the bridge, said she watched the scene unfold in front of her. She said the Lumina was traveling at a high rate of speed and heading toward Greene when it crashed into the house at the corner of Main Street and Libby Avenue.

“She hit one median strip and then the other,” Spencer said. “The signs on the median went down and a hubcap went flying. She went up the lawn and the car went airborne, right into the house.”

The Lumina sped across a stretch of newly seeded lawn on the Libby Avenue side of Cloutier’s home before sailing into the house.

“It was like an explosion. It was such a loud noise, we didn’t know what had happened,” said Kristina Urban, who lives in a house on Libby Avenue next to Cloutier’s house. “We came out and there was dust everywhere. We looked over here and there’s a car in the house.”

As Urban and her family rushed up to the crash scene, Cloutier and his friend were just coming outside. Benson also got out of the house.

“She got out of the car on her own,” Spencer said. “She came out through the passenger side door.”

While firefighters examined the crash scene, police were controlling a growing crowd of on-lookers and searching for witnesses.

Benson was examined by rescue crews but was not believed to have been physically hurt. Cloutier went to the hospital where he was expected to get stitched up.

The area of the house where the car burst through the wall was lined with six or eight windows before the crash, a neighbor said. It was unknown whether or not the family would be able to stay in their home Wednesday night.

A crew from Ace Towing responded and used a single tow truck to pull the Lumina from Cloutier’s kitchen. The woodwork creaked and shifted as the car came out but there were no further mishaps.

Lewiston police Officer David Brule was heading the investigation.

Still shaken up as the car was being removed from the house, Spencer considered herself lucky that she did not drive into the path of the Lumina. She was also still coming to grips with what she had witnessed.

“It was wild,” she said. “It was just incredible.”