For more than nine years, Lord Windsor Coffee stood at the corner of Third Street and Cerritos Avenue. It is one of Alamitos Beach’s defining neighborhood anchors. A place where regulars knew the rhythm of the espresso machine as well as the cadence of owner Wade Windsor’s voice.
On Tuesday morning, that familiar corner sat boarded up, its facade splintered and covered in plywood after a black SUV tore through the storefront the afternoon before. The crash happened just after the shop had closed Monday, roughly 30 minutes after the last customers had left.
According to Long Beach Police Department, officers arrested 29-year-old Alonzo Harbin. He is being held on suspicion of felony DUI and driving on a suspended license tied to a prior DUI conviction. Police said Harbin crashed just blocks from his home and allegedly attempted to leave the scene before being detained.
Authorities would not disclose Harbin’s exact blood alcohol content. They only confirmed that it met or exceeded California’s legal threshold. Police also declined to specify how many prior DUI arrests were on his record.
Wade Windsor: Thankful for the timing—because someone could have been seriously hurt if not killed
For Wade, however, the first thing that lingered was not the arrest—it was timing.
Only minutes earlier, two women had just finished their drinks outside. A father and daughter had been playing near the patio. Inside, Wade was training a new employee when he heard the sound before impact.
“I was just about to send him out to get the patio furniture,” Wade said, still processing how narrowly the moment avoided becoming far worse. “We’re pretty lucky.”
That luck, he said, came in layers.
The hope to move Lord Windsor forward following the drunk driver crash…
Though the SUV ripped through the front of the shop, city inspectors later told Wade the building had not been structurally compromised. A seismic retrofit completed decades ago meant the damaged section was largely aesthetic rather than load-bearing—a distinction that may have spared the business from a much longer closure.
Even the fire hydrant the SUV sheared off ended up sparing the building additional destruction.
“The water was flooding onto Third Street instead of onto the building,” Wade said. “We really dodged a bullet there.”
For anyone familiar with Long Beach’s recent string of storefront crashes, that detail mattered: water damage can often finish what impact begins.
Outside, debris stretched across the block—glass, fractured wood, bent signage, a damaged parklet, and multiple struck vehicles. Police said one woman in another vehicle hit during the crash was transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Wade said neighbors quickly moved into action. One nearby resident, he was told, physically stepped in front of Harbin’s vehicle to stop him from leaving.
The odd encounter between a business owner and drunk driver
In the immediate aftermath, Wade said Harbin briefly entered the shop and insisted he was not intoxicated, offering an insurance policy number. But in the confusion, nothing was exchanged.
“To be quite honest,” Wade said, “I stood in shock for a good—I don’t know—half-minute before I realized: ‘Oh crap, the entire front of my shop was gone.’”
Wade remains hopeful the cafe could reopen within a week, pending insurance coordination between both the business and the property owner. For a neighborhood coffee shop, a week can feel long. For a place like Lord Windsor—already woven into the daily routines of Alamitos Beach—it felt even longer.
Lord Windsor has become more than a coffee counter. It has become one of the early spaces that helped redefine how Long Beach thought about coffee altogether: intentional, neighborhood-rooted, and quietly influential long before “third wave” became common local vocabulary.
Lord Windsor is located at 1101 E. 3rd St.
