She Grabs a Brick and Breaks a Car Window After Hearing Thumps From the Trunk — What She Finds Inside Answers Many Prayers

At first, Tiasha Chaplin thought it was a prank.

Image source: WAVE-TV

She "heard a thump, thump, thump" coming from a car in a Louisville parking lot Monday afternoon, WAVE-TV reported. Chaplin and a group of women she was with kept walking, but 911 was called just in case.

Then on their walk back through that same spot, Chaplin told WAVE they heard the sound again — and this time another passerby heard a woman's voice and "said she couldn't breathe."

With no sign of emergency personnel, Chaplin said she was scared and didn't want to wait.

“So I ran across the street, got a brick, threw the brick through the passenger window, and unlocked the door,” Chaplin told WLKY-TV. “A man who was on scene with me unlocked the truck."

Image source: WAVE-TV

Inside the trunk was a barely conscious Aundrea Stone, 44, who was rushed to the hospital with a broken arm and severe dehydration.

Aundrea Stone (Image source: WAVE-TV)

Police said Stone told them after she got behind the wheel of the car on Friday at a food mart she frequents, a "scraggly" white man wearing a hoodie "indicated he had a weapon,” police spokesman Dwight Mitchell told WLKY, and forced Stone to drive around Kentucky and Indiana for a few days.

Stone was reported missing after not picking up her daughter. "We knew that something was going on because everything was out of character for her," Stone’s pastor, Rev. Carl Fletcher, told WAVE.

Fletcher said family and friends posted fliers and started praying.

Image source: WLKY-TV

“We prayed and we weren't going to give up until we knew what the result was,” Fletcher told WLKY. “Our mindset was to hope for the best and pray for the best. And God heard that prayer.”

Police said they received a call about an hour before Stone was rescued indicating sounds were heard from a parked car. It's not clear if that call came from the group Chaplin was with.

“When the first officer came there, he was there about 15 minutes, checked the car thoroughly, ran the plates, did not hear anything,” Mitchell told WLKY. “At that point, he subsequently cleared the scene.”

Mitchell added to WLKY that the car’s plates weren’t flagged during the first call, but the second time officers went to the scene the plates were connected to a missing person's report. Police credit passersby with saving Stone's life.

“She's dealing with some slight trauma," Stone's pastor told WLKY, "but she's alive and going to recover from everything that's happened to her." Stone's mother told the station she's still sore and has been having nightmares.

Police are looking at surveillance video to gather more information, WLKY reported.

"We don't know what she's been through," a tearful Chaplin told WAVE. "It's a blessing and it is odd that to me that it took for us to walk by to save her life, I'm just glad we saved her life."