'I'm so glad that I'm alive': Woman wakes to find car in her living room

A Whangārei woman narrowly avoided having her head crushed by a large brick when a car crashed into her living room late at night.

Jan McLean, 74, was asleep on her couch when a "massive crash" startled her awake around 10.30pm on Thursday.

"I thought the sound had come from the TV," the Regent resident said.

McLean, bleeding from the side of her face, looked up to see a man staring at her through a hole where her front windows should have been.

"I just started screaming and kept screaming, and I couldn't stop shaking," she said.

Glass was all through her hair, and pieces of broken wood covered her legs.

A large concrete brick lay next to McLean's head on the pillow – miraculously leaving only a graze on the side of her face.

Jan McLean is lucky to be alive after a car hit a powerpole then smashed into her living room where she was asleep on the couch. Photo / Tania Whyte

A power pole on the corner of Hatea Dr and Nixon St was hit with such force by the speeding car it came to rest in a tree in her front yard.

"Everyone's power went out," McLean said.

Glass had been shattered in a second-storey window by a splintered piece of her wooden fence that had been flung metres into the air.

And a concrete fence near the road was propelled into the front of McLean's home and further down the road.

"It's a miracle ... I'm so glad that I'm alive. It's only now that I've realised how surreal it is because I keep coming to look at the damage, thinking did this really happen to me. You never think it's going to happen to you."

McLean said one of the car's front wheels was completely bent beneath the vehicle.

"How these kids didn't get killed is beyond me."

The damage to the outside of Jan McLean's home, where a car ploughed through her fence and crashed into the front of her home. Photo / Tania Whyte

McLean said she watched as six youths got out of the crashed car and navigated their way around parts of her broken roadside fence and building materials from her destroyed living room wall.

The 25-year-old male driver fled on foot before officers and their police dogs caught up with him.

The man appeared in the Whangārei District Court on Friday to face a number of charges that included failing to stop to ascertain injury and driving dangerously causing injury.

A Northland police spokesperson said the car, reportedly being driven fast, had hit a kerb prior to smashing through McLean's property.

"Fortunately no one was injured."

McLean now faced a freezing wait for her home to be temporarily boarded up and get repaired.

"I can't leave the house like this, it's all exposed."

Her plans to put her home of two years on the market so she could move closer to Auckland-based family were now on hold.

McLean said it wasn't the first time residents near Banff St had had vehicles crash into their homes.

"We need those big metal barriers to stop all the speeding cars coming around the corner too fast and crashing into our homes and hurting someone. The speed they come through here is absolutely ridiculous."