Congratulations to Bobby Aulds for being a hero and saving a life! 

BY ROBBIE EVANS • REVANS@THENEWSSTAR.COM • AUGUST 25, 2008

Melanie Sanders King was inches from drowning after inadvertently driving her car into a rain-swollen drainage canal in West Monroe.

As her car began sinking, King frantically tried to get out. Water began filling the car as she tried to break the window glass.

With the water up to her chin, King resigned herself to seeking the least painful way to die.

Her rescue is the reason the Northeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross will honor Bobby Aulds and Andy Stroud with the organization’s Extraordinary Lifesaving Award on Sept. 23.

King recalled the horror of that Aug. 11 morning and the moment she realized Stroud and Aulds were coming to her rescue.

“I heard a big thud,” King said, not realizing that Stroud, who works for a plumbing company, had thrown a large piece of concrete through her back window and that Aulds was swimming toward her car with a baseball bat.

“I feel like I’ve got two angels,” she said. “They really are responsible for me being alive today.”

Aulds, who owns Green Sports in West Monroe, happened to be at his warehouse several hundred feet from the scene when his son called to tell him of the accident.

Stroud said Aulds deserves all the credit for the rescue. Aulds disagreed.
“I don’t think I did anything that extraordinary,” Aulds said.

King landed in the ditch unwittingly thinking it was a rain-covered parking lot.

Following several nights of heavy rain, King was looking for a business on Drago Street — just off North Seventh Street — around mid-morning when she tried to turn around her Lincoln Continental. She thought she was turning around in just a few inches of water.

It was not a parking lot. She had driven into a major drainage canal that ran beside the street.

“I had no idea it was a drainage ditch,” King said. “It was just drizzling at the time and there weren’t any streams of running water. It just looked like an inch or two of water standing.”

Once it hit water, King’s car died. She tried twice to crank it.

At the same time, King noticed Stroud waving at her. She waved back, not knowing that he was actually motioning to her to avoid the canal.

“We were in the back of the shop when I saw her,” Stroud said. “I tried to catch her, but she went right off into the canal.”

King tried to open her door, but she could not get it unlocked. Feeling claustrophobic, she grabbed an emergency tool out of her glove compartment and began trying to break windows.

“Then I looked down and realized there was water on my feet,” King said. “By the time the water got to the top of my seat and my waist, I knew I was in trouble.”

As water continued to rise inside the car, King wondered why bystanders were watching the ordeal instead of coming to her rescue.

“I don’t swim real well, so I was trying to find a piece of rope to tie around my waist so I could go after her,” Stroud said. “I was able to call 9-1-1.”

But emergency personnel wouldn’t make it in time to save King. Water was already up to her chin.

“I thought it was really strange that I was drowning in a parking lot,” King said. “I tried to figure out what would be the easiest way to drown without a lot of pain — maybe gulp water.”

When Aulds arrived at the drainage canal, he was shocked to find a half-submerged vehicle with a woman trapped inside.

Aulds twice tried to pull King through the car’s broken rear window, but the water kept sucking her back down. On the third attempt, he managed to pull King out of the sinking car’s grip.

As his hands bled from the broken glass, Aulds held onto King as he swam to safety.

“It was either react right then or watch her drown,” Aulds said. “The last thing I wanted to think about was news reports of a lady drowning while bystanders let it happen.”

King’s car was found several days later, a couple hundred feet from where it plunged into the canal. Most of her personal and work belongings were lost, but that didn’t matter.

“It was an experience you don’t want anybody else to have,” she said. “But it was a good ending.”