It wasn’t exactly a welcome sight for Kaysea Tassara as she looked upon the significant damage done to her soon-to-open Boutte business. Nonetheless, in another way, she felt incredibly fortunate.
“I had just left an hour prior, thank goodness,” said Tassara. “Because I was up on the ladder hanging lights, and that could have been awful.”
On Friday afternoon, a car crashed into the front of Tassara’s flower shop, Flowers Near Me. It caused significant damage to the building, which will delay the new store’s opening – it was previously scheduled for Nov. 20.
Tassara was heading to a Trunk or Treat event with her family when she received a phone call from the building’s property manager informing her of the incident.
“She was two hours away and couldn’t get there, so she needed me to be her eyes and ears and to talk to the police,” Tassara said. “We went there and I’m thinking somebody maybe backed their car in and broke a window, like it was an accident. It was a thousand times worse than I could have imagined. Five panels of glass, including my door, was completely caved into my shop. The entirety of my storefront was destroyed.
“I just thought, ‘this cannot be happening right now.’”
Tassara noted that the driver fled the scene, but a suspect was arrested a day after the incident. She said the driver is not insured.
Nobody was injured in the incident, something Tassara said she was thankful for.
Right now, the focus has been on working with insurance to find out what the next steps are. Tassara said the building itself is insured by the property owner, but Tassara’s insurance for the business was to go into effect on Monday, a few days after the crash – so details are being ironed out in that regard.
“They’re almost done cleaning up and now it’s a matter of how quickly we can get it fixed,” said Tassara on Tuesday.
She said a new opening date is up in the air until the details can be sorted out.
“Another tough part is I had offered 32 positions to small business owners to fill the sales floor with handmade goods made here locally,” said Tassara. “They were supposed to be loading in their inventory this week. So on top of everything, it’s not something that’s just affecting me.”
Beyond simply happening before the store’s opening, the timing could not have been worse.
“I was fully invested in this business, every penny, every ounce of my savings because we were about to open and I was about to have some type of return,” Tassara said. “We’re just before the holidays and this is like the past major push, pretty much, until Valentine’s Day when it comes to flower shopping.”
A GoFundMe (titled “Help keep Flowers Near Me going after a hit and run”) had raised more than $5,700 as of Tuesday evening. She said she was overwhelmed by the support.
“I’ve never had a community rally behind me in any way to this kind of extent. At a time I’m feeling like, wow, there’s no way I can recover from this, it’s given me a glimpse of hope that this shop can still be everything I wanted it to be.”
Tassara and her family recently moved to St. Rose from the West Coast. Her husband, Thomas, is a member of the U.S. Coast Guard and was born and raised in St. Rose. Tassara previously owned a flower shop in Washington for five years. They moved to the area a little more than a year ago, and she initially hoped to bring her previous business with her. Space limitations prevented that, so she spent approximately a year and a half saving money to open a new shop in Louisiana.
The opportunity to secure what she considered the perfect space finally allowed her to pursue that dream and establish roots locally.
The community response, she said, has inspired hope that the incident could be merely a temporary setback and not the end of her business before it began as she initially feared.
I feel like the community has wrapped us in their arms and let us know we’re going to be OK,” Tassara said.
