Woman in banana costume calls 911 after Orlando crash

A woman in a banana costume called 911 after a car crashed into an Orlando bar's outdoor dining area early Saturday morning — and became the internet's hero of the weekend before the paint was dry on her Halloween makeup.

Stephanie Oropeza and her fiancé were driving home from a Halloween party around 4 a.m. when they came across the wreck outside The Moderne Bar on Colonial Drive. Surveillance footage shows the car crossing to the wrong side of the road before veering into the bar's outdoor seating. Oropeza, still in full costume, is then seen calmly on the phone with emergency dispatchers. "It kind of just smushed everything all the way to the front," she told reporters. No one was hurt.

The bar's owner, Michael Nguyen, posted the surveillance video and asked locals to help identify the caller. The response he got was not the one he expected: viewers assumed the footage was fake. "Is this AI? Like, are you messing with us?" he recounted people asking. Nguyen's summary — "a rogue 4:30 a.m. banana just roaming the streets of Mills, just saving the day, reporting the incident" — did the rounds online, and Oropeza woke up to headlines calling her the "banana hero." The bar thanked her with a free meal.

The damage was not trivial. The crash wrecked at least six tables and dozens of chairs, and Nguyen estimates repairs at $30,000 to $50,000. Information about the driver was not immediately available as of Sunday.

The most useful person at the scene held no title, carried no equipment and wore no uniform — she happened to be dressed as fruit and did the one thing that mattered. The bar, meanwhile, gets to rebuild.