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GREENSBORO - Police are investigating what caused a driver to crash a pickup truck into a garage this morning.

Timothy Chad Efrid, 29, of Greensboro, was taken to Moses Cone Hospital after the crash at about 8:45 a.m, according to police.

No one was inside the house at 5709 River Glen Drive when the crash happened.

Efrid has not been charged with any crimes, said Lt. Dennis Willoughby.

A Ford pickup truck was driving north on River Glen Drive in north Greensboro when it left the road, clipped a mailbox, then slammed through the closed garage door, Willoughby said. The truck missed the support pillars on either side of the garage door but nearly poked through the garage wall by the front door of the house.

There were personal belongings but no vehicle inside the garage.

Firefighters responded to the home en masse because neighbors reported seeing a lot of smoke and thought the garage was on fire. But the smoke turned out to be from the tires of the truck as they spun on the concrete floor of the garage, said Battalion Chief T.H. Cox of the Greensboro Fire Department.

"He was so wedged into the garage he couldn't get out," said Brittney Hicks, an across-the-street neighbor who said she saw the truck hit the mail box from her second-floor bedroom window.

Hicks said the driver appeared to be in his 20s, and she said she recognized the truck as belonging to someone in the neighborhood. It appeared the pickup was speeding, she said, though she did not know how fast the truck was going.

Brittney's mother, Kelli Hicks, said River Glen Drive sees more than its share of speeders despite a speed limit of 25 mph.

"They just fly through here," Kelli Hicks said.

The owner of the home with the wrecked garage, Caryn Cruickson-Bush, said she knew something was up when she got a call from her daughter in Philadelphia. Her daughter is the contact for the alarm company, which had called her to let her know that the alarm was going off in her mother's home in Greensboro.

Moments after Cruickson-Bush heard from her daughter, the Greensboro Fire Department called her at her downtown office to say that a truck had hit her home. (A firefighter told her they found her number on a cell phone bill in her house.)

Cruickson-Bush said the damage to the house might be worse than it initially looked. She said she saw cracks in the walls of the house near the foyer, and her front door is stuck shut.

"I don't think that's a good thing," she said.

But if there is any good fortune in this incident, it is this: Cruickson-Bush's husband, Edward Bush, had called in sick from his job with the city of Greensboro on Monday.

But he felt well enough to go in today. Otherwise, his Chevrolet Avalanche would have been parked in the driveway - right in the path of the pickup truck that hit the garage.

"If he had hit that truck," Cruickson-Bush said of the pickup truck driver, "that man would have been killed."

Contact John Newsom at 373-7312 or john.newsom@news-record.com