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A South Carolina man is behind bars after dashcam footage captured a young woman — hands cuffed behind her back — desperately fleeing his vehicle on a rural road while he allegedly tried to run her down.
Authorities arrested 39-year-old Jonathan Willard of New Ellenton, South Carolina, and charged him with one count each of kidnapping and impersonation of a law enforcement officer following the May 29 incident on Williston Road in Aiken County.
According to the Associated Press, the woman had been walking when Willard pulled up behind her in a green Cadillac and told her he was with the police. He allegedly took her phone and Social Security card, put her in handcuffs, and forced her into the back seat.
When he pulled over at a gated property and began going through his trunk, she climbed over the seat and escaped through the open driver's side door.
That's when truck driver Anthony Moore came into the picture.
Moore was hauling a route down Williston Road when the woman burst from the roadside and ran directly into traffic, her hands still bound behind her back. A vehicle was cutting across both lanes, pursuing her as she zigzagged from one side of the road to the other.
"She would run on one side of the road — he'd try to run her over — then she'd run to the other side… and he'd try to run her over there," Moore told WRDW.
When the woman reached Moore's truck and climbed in, Willard approached and claimed to be a law enforcement officer. She immediately told Moore otherwise. "She jumped in my car and said, 'No, he is not. He tried to kidnap me, sir,'" Moore recalled.
A bystander named Glen called 911 and removed the handcuffs from the woman's wrists.
The incident carried an especially painful detail — the woman told Moore she had just graduated the day before, and that her abductor had also taken her diploma.
Moore — a pastor at Amazing Grace Ministries in Denmark, South Carolina, and a 27-year Army veteran — deflected praise after the rescue. "I just see it as a divine assignment from God," he told the Associated Press. "That a life needed to be saved."
Willard remains in the Aiken County Detention Center. No court dates have been scheduled.
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