OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — An Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper stopped along I-40 early Thursday morning to help an elderly woman who was stranded with no gas.
He thought it would be a quick stop, by getting her some gas so she could be on her way.
However, he says the more they talked about where she was going, he realized something wasn’t quite right.
“Pretty quick, I noticed that some stuff wasn’t adding up because she told me that she was on her way to Dallas, but she was westbound on I-40 west of El Reno,” John Jones, Trooper with OHP said.
Jones was on his way to a meeting in Oklahoma City Thursday morning when he saw an SUV with its hazard lights flashing on the opposite side of the highway.
“So, I made a U-turn and went back to check on the vehicle,” Jones said. “When I got up there, initially the lady told me that she was just ran out of gas.”
Turns out, there was a bigger problem.
“She was confused and lost,” Jones said. “I asked her if she had her cell phone with her and she had forgot that when she left the house. She was having difficulty remembering family, family members, phone numbers.”
With no phone, Jones wasn’t sure how to get ahold of her family.
“I ran her information through our computer system and her tag number on her vehicle,” Jones said. “Initially when I did that, it didn’t hit on anything, which really kind of shocked me that no one was missing her.”
Shortly after, he got a call from dispatch.
“We had got what’s been called a delayed hit on a missing person, and at that point in time, we got the phone number of a granddaughter that had reported her missing,” Jones said.
He drove the grandmother to the El Reno Police Department where her granddaughter picked her up.
Jones says he’s not sure what would have happened had he not turned around.
“I was going to make sure that she got the help that she needed before I left out of there,” Jones said.
Jones says he couldn’t have done this alone. He wanted to thank his longtime partner Lieutenant Stephen Cornell for helping as well.
