A woman injured when a car was driven through a Naples thrift store has sued the nonprofit that ran it, and the figure in the complaint that reads like a damages claim is not one

A woman injured when a vehicle was driven through the St. Matthew's House Thrift Store in Naples last year has sued the nonprofit that operates it, alleging it failed to take adequate steps to protect the people shopping there.

The claim was reported by WINK News, which read the complaint. The court file itself could not be opened by this desk, and the particulars below are the outlet's account of the filing rather than an independent reading of it.

Every allegation described here is an allegation. No court has tested any of it.

What the complaint is said to claim

WINK News reports that Deima Torna Garcia filed suit on August 10 in Collier County Circuit Court against St. Matthew's House Inc, seeking more than $50,000 and requesting a jury trial.

The complaint is reported to arise from the crash of April 10, 2025 at the thrift store on Airport Road South, in which a vehicle was driven from the parking area, through an opening in a perimeter fence and into the building at about 10.40 in the morning, continuing through the showroom.

Two allegations sit at the centre of it. The first is that the nonprofit knew or should have known the driver posed a danger, on the basis that he had previously been an employee and a participant in its programmes. The second is that the storefront had no fixed barriers, such as bollards or guardrails, separating the parking area from the building.

The plaintiff is reported to allege serious injuries, disability, disfigurement, medical costs and lost earnings.

The nonprofit's response

St. Matthew's House told WINK News it had not yet seen the filing.

"This is the first we are hearing of the lawsuit filed. As such we cannot offer comment on the suit. However, as we have been since the April 10th incident, we continue to pray for the healing of those impacted," the outlet quotes President and CEO Ben Bridges as saying.

The $50,000 is not a damages figure

The sum in the complaint is the one most likely to be misread, so it is worth being exact about it.

Pleading more than $50,000 in a Florida circuit court is a jurisdictional threshold. It establishes which court has authority to hear the case. It is not an estimate of the plaintiff's losses, not a settlement demand and not a valuation of the claim, and a very large share of circuit civil complaints in Florida carry a version of the same line.

What is independently established about the crash

The underlying incident is not in dispute and was covered widely at the time, independently of the outlet reporting this week's filing.

Six people were hurt. One employee was critically injured, with severe organ damage and multiple broken bones. Donald Russell was arrested at the scene and charged with aggravated battery counts, and on the outlet's related coverage he has pleaded not guilty. He has not been convicted, and nothing in this item says he did what he is accused of.

The store later reopened with bollards installed along the frontage. That is a matter of record rather than an allegation, and it describes what was done after the crash, not what a court will find about the position before it.

The wider point for anyone running a storefront

The barrier allegation is the part of this filing that reaches past the parties to it.

Vehicles entering storefronts are a recognised hazard in retail, and the risk concentrates where parking faces a glass front head-on, which describes a great deal of Southwest Florida retail. Bollards are the standard physical answer.

Whatever a court eventually decides about this store on this date, the questions the filing raises for an operator are ordinary ones: whether the frontage has physical protection now, and whether the general liability cover has been looked at recently with this specific scenario in mind.

The scale of the defendant

St. Matthew's House is one of the larger nonprofits in Collier County, and its own filings are public.

Its most recent IRS Form 990 return with data, for the tax period ending in 2023, reports total revenue of $43,737,338 and total functional expenses of $41,155,073. It reports total assets of $55,045,040 at the end of the period against total liabilities of $10,601,095. Revenue on the same measure was $15.2m for the period ending in 2020, so the organisation has grown substantially across those four returns.

Those are the organisation's own reported figures. They describe the size of the body being sued and nothing more. They are not a prediction about this case, and in a claim of this kind it is an insurer rather than a balance sheet that stands behind any eventual outcome.