Some people may think of it as a prank, but it can be dangerous. Teenagers have been throwing rocks from an overpass onto the traffic below. A driver whose car was struck by one of the rocks is shaken up - and police are taking the matter seriously.
Tuesday morning Kelly Stone was driving northbound on Keystone Avenue on the southeast side near Iowa Street.
"That's where it hit and made a loud sound," she said, showing where a rock hit her car. "Had it been up a little bit more, it would have come up through the window at my friend."
That was her fear: that she or someone else could have been seriously hurt.
"With the bridge being as it is, we could have swerved and hit the bridge, there were other cars next to us. We could have hit a car," she said.
And she wasn't the only victim.
"This is what was thrown at the bicyclist's head," Stone said, picking up an object about the size of half a brick.
A cyclist riding on Keystone was struck. It was how she realized the rocks came from above and not just some debris on the road.
"The fact that they not only threw it at a car but they threw it at a bicyclist means that there's no kind of processing that this is a...I mean, throwing at a car you might think that it's just going to hurt the car but throwing it at someone's head, that's violent," she said.
Violence that could have serious consequences.
"What one person perceives as a prank," explained Indianapolis Metro Police Captain Richard Riddle, "could actually put someone's life in jeopardy of harm by a simple act of throwing a rock or throwing an object at a moving vehicle."
In 2005, truck driver Richard Rodriguez was on I-70 near Lynhurst when an object came crashing through his windshield. He died two days later.
Kelly hopes her experience is a warning to signal action before something else bad happens.
"What could solve this problem right now is having more community involvement and having people showing up saying, 'We care about our kids,' and 'we care about our neighborhood,'" she said.
Kelly ran after those teens and gave a description to police but no arrests have been made.
This is such a serious issue the state legislature has made it illegal to throw objects from an overpass. If a person is injured or killed, that violation becomes a felony.
