Julia, a TikTok creator known as @rootedwithjulia, recounted a terrifying trip to Charleston, South Carolina, three years ago. She declined extra rental car insurance, thinking nothing serious would happen, but her instincts went off from the start.
According to Motor 1, after dinner on the first night, she spotted a man nearby, and moments later he suddenly fell hard, leaving her so shaken that she ended up crying at a bar while staying close to her mom and sister.
She called her husband and said, “I wanna come home. I think something bad is going to happen. I just don’t wanna be here anymore.”
Things got way worse after that
Julia shared a series of clips on TikTok to share her story. The following day, Julia and her mom went to the hotel pool to enjoy the nice weather. It was 85 degrees even though it was November. They had the whole pool area to themselves since it was downstairs and away from the main hotel. When her mom stood up to walk around, she slipped and fell hard on the ground.
“She falls. I go to help her off the ground. Her kneecap is gone, y’all, literally shattered. It looked like something out of a scary movie,” Julia said.
Julia tried to help her mom get up and saw that her kneecap was completely broken into pieces. She said it looked like a scene from a scary movie. Julia doesn’t do well in emergencies and started screaming for help, but the hotel staff was all the way upstairs and couldn’t hear her right away.
After an ambulance took them to the hospital, her mom chose to wrap up the injury and catch their flight home instead of getting surgery in Charleston. Julia had to take care of her mom for the rest of the day and pack all their bags without any sleep.
The next morning when they were ready to leave, Julia went to get the car but it wasn’t in the parking spot where she always left it. She walked around looking for it and called her sister for help. Her sister told her to press the panic button on the key fob to find the car, but Julia couldn’t find her keys anywhere in her bag. She figured out that she left them at the pool when everything went crazy the day before.
Julia called the police about the missing car. The officer told her right away that the car had just been in a three-car crash where someone died. Her car wasn’t the one where the person died, but the police didn’t know where the driver was. Julia spotted a hotel trolley and asked for a ride to the airport. They just barely made it to their flight.
Four days after getting home, the investigator called Julia with news. They caught the person who took the car. Police found the wrecked rental car sitting at a random business, and when the owner reported it, they found a man walking on a road nearby. He still had Julia’s keys with him, which proved he stole the car.
