Bria Brooks says she was simply riding the conveyor through her usual car wash when her Lexus RX 350 stopped moving, made a grinding noise, and was then struck from behind by a pickup truck — leaving roughly $4,000 in damage and a monthslong fight over who is actually responsible. The crash happened on Jan. 16 at a Gas & Wash on West 183rd Street in Tinley Park, a location Brooks says she had visited dozens of times without incident before that day.
Brooks told FOX 32 Chicago that her Lexus stopped inside the wash tunnel before the pickup truck behind her collided with it. She says the driver of that truck, a 2023 Ford F-150, told her the car wash machine had malfunctioned. A Gas & Wash incident report dated the day of the crash records Brooks describing the Lexus as “rocking without moving” and says she heard a loud noise; the report also lists scratches and dents on her vehicle, though it contains no written admission of responsibility from the business.
Brooks says a manager at the time promised Gas & Wash would cover the damage, which she estimates at about $4,000. She also says she needed a rental car afterward, on top of the roughly $50 a month she already pays for a car wash membership there.
Insurance Portal and Arbitration Addressed Different Issues
The paper trail only gets messier from there. Screenshots of Allstate’s claim portal reviewed by the station assign zero responsibility to Brooks and place 100% of the fault on the pickup truck driver. But a June 30 letter says an arbitration panel later ruled against Allstate, meaning the insurer could not recover its payment or Brooks’s $250 deductible — and the letter says Allstate was asked to pay part of the other driver’s damages instead. The arbitration addressed recovery of payments, not the portal’s fault allocation. A follow-up letter dated July 1 confirmed that Allstate’s recovery efforts had ended…