Minutes before their 2 p.m. religion class on Monday, Weinberg seniors Lara Bakhos and Katie Webber strolled past The Arch and headed toward Fisk Hall.

Webber glanced to her right and saw a gray 1982 Oldsmobile shoot out of an alley, its headlights pointed right at them.

“Lara, is he going to turn or something?” Webber asked her friend.

He didn’t turn. The Oldsmobile barreled into a Toyota Corolla parked on Sheridan Road, jumped the curb and sped across the sidewalk where the two stood. Webber grabbed Bakhos.

“We had to run to get out of the way,” Webber said.

The car mowed over several bushes outside Harris Hall and slammed into a tree only feet away from the building that houses Northwestern’s history department.

“If it hit someone, they would have been seriously injured or dead,” said Speech sophomore Jake Reitan, who was walking from class at Fisk Hall. “This shows how close you can come to death.”

Tyrone Sanders, 63, of Evanston was driving the Oldsmobile north down the alley that runs perpendicular to Sheridan Road between Alice Millar Chapel and Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national headquarters.

He was driving at about 40 miles per hour, said Officer Robert George of the Evanston Police Department.

“I must have fallen asleep,” said Sanders, who was uninjured and refused medical treatment.

Minutes after the accident, Sanders, wearing dark glasses and balancing a toothpick in his mouth, surveyed his totaled car and shook his head. He had just bought the car from a family member last month, he said.

Sanders, who works as a custodian for the Evanston Public Library, said he was driving to his home on the 2000 block of Darrow Avenue. He worked from 7 a.m. to about 1:45 p.m., though his normal shift ended at noon.

He said he hasn’t been in an accident since he started working at the library eight years ago, and he’s never taken the alley between Hinman and Chicago avenues to go home.

“What am I doing way over here?” he wondered aloud.

Just after 2 p.m., Weinberg junior Elizabeth Burden was running past Fisk Hall. She was listening to music on her headphones when she noticed a damaged Corolla on the grass next to the sidewalk.

“Then I realized it was mine,” she said.

Burden, a member of NU’s women’s golf team, had parked the car on Sheridan Road at 7 p.m. Sunday night after returning from a weekend tournament at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Following the accident police directed traffic for at least 30 minutes while they examined the scene.

Police could not be reached for comment Monday on whether Sanders would be charged.