AUSTIN (KXAN) — A mother driving with her two children is recuperating after someone shot into her car early Monday morning and struck her in the leg.

At about 1:07 a.m. Monday, Georgetown police and emergency medical personnel got an emergency response activation from BMW at the 3000 block of E. University Avenue, which is just west of the S.H. 130 toll road.

Amy Richardson told KXAN that she and her two young children flew back to Austin from a week-long vacation in Maine. While driving them all home to Georgetown, she said she heard a loud bang that she mistook for something happening to her car.

“I was like, ouch, something hit me, and I sort of started looking around,” Richardson said. “I thought something fell through the ceiling of my car. I was touching the car thinking, ‘Did something just fall through?’ I thought maybe a rock had come through the windshield.”

A moment later, however, she said she lost feeling below her right knee, so she pulled over.

“Suddenly, I’m like, ‘I think I just got shot,’ and so I said it out loud,” Richardson said. “My kids were just like, ‘What?’ My eight- and four-year-old were in the backseat, which was scary.”

Richardson found the bullet wound on the side of her right leg, so she called a BMW representative through the emergency alert button in her car to report what happened. She said that representative then contacted police, and it took first responders about 18 minutes to arrive.

“The actual gunshot wound wasn’t that painful,” Richardson said. “I actually took a phone charger cord and made myself a little tourniquet. The most pain was actually below my knee, so I tied a second one. I had two phone cords. That was lucky, so I tied a second on there.”

A woman driving with her two children in the car in Georgetown was shot in the leg in the early hours of Monday Photo: KXAN/Will Dupree

According to a press release from the Georgetown Police Department, an officer also applied a tourniquet before Richardson was taken to Ascension Seton Williamson hospital in Round Rock.

She underwent surgery later Monday morning to extract the bullet lodged in her leg and have a rod installed since the bullet shattered her right femur. Police now plan to send the bullet fragments for forensic testing.

“I’m still mentally processing and being like, ‘Remember that time I got shot?'” Richardson said. “I’m a statistic now as a person who’s part of random gun violence or even an accident.”

KXAN met with her Tuesday afternoon shortly after she was released from the hospital. She was able to use a walker to get into the car so that she could return home.

“Of all the things that could have happened, this is the best case scenario,” Richardson said. “Really, it’s a major setback. Physically, I’m going to have to do therapies, and it will be a long time for me to recover fully, but it could have been so much worse. I’m just thankful it wasn’t.”

Police said there are very few leads in the case, and the shooting appears to be random.

“The hope obviously is that it just was a hunting accident or a stray bullet from somebody in their own property and not something nefarious or dangerous,” Richardson told KXAN.

She created a popular children’s clothing company called June & January. She posted updates from the hospital on social media about her condition and the status of the police investigation, which led to lots of well wishes from customers and fans. She’d like to urge all of them to talk to their own children about what they should do in an emergency given that she’ll now have to have that same conversation with her son and daughter.

“As kids we were all taught to just dial 911,” Richardson said, “but now we’re talking passcodes and face IDs and stuff like that. It’s like make sure your kids can call for help if they need it.”

Anyone with information about this shooting should contact Detective Michael Morris at the Georgetown Police Department at (512) 930-2590.