This version of this story has been changed to correctly describe the passenger in the vehicle. 

COVINGTON, Ga. — Alisha Jacques has some bruises and was recovering at home Monday after she and her brother got a little more excitement than they planned on New Year’s Eve.

“I’m trying to get comfortable and lay down but it’s extremely difficult,” she said.

An EF-1 tornado with a 90 mph wind gust picked up her 2015 Ford Escape and flipped it in the parking lot, trapping her and her brother outside Chick-fil-A on Brown Bridge Road Friday night.

“It just picked up and flipped my car three or four times. It landed on my side. The horn was beeping and the windshield was shattered.

“It was horrifying,” she recalled. 

Like many others that day, she said she never heard a warning about severe weather approaching the area before traveling with a brother from their home near Georgia Hwy. 212.

“If there was a warning out, I wouldn’t have gone out,” she said. “I hate tornadoes.”

The two had traveled to the restaurant about 5:30 p.m. because it was closing early for New Year’s Eve.

However, just after 5:45 p.m., a severe thunderstorm over Oxford moving east at 25 mph started to form a funnel cloud. Morgan, Walton and Newton counties were then placed under a tornado warning, according to Fox5 News.

Jacques, who works for a cellphone company, said she was waiting for her order in the drive-through line when she saw sparks fly from an electric transformer on a power pole outside the restaurant.

She said the lights went out at the restaurant and the wind began blowing hard.

“(The wind) just gusted all of a sudden. We had no time to think. There was no time to do anything.

“I couldn’t go anywhere. There was a car behind me … in front of me.”

She said she tried to pull up beside the truck in front of her “but it didn’t help.”

“I tried to get up to the truck in front of me to, like, pull up beside him. I even pulled up window to window with him and it did nothing,” she said. 

“It still picked up my car and threw it. It was crazy. We were in the third lane and ended up at the front door.”

She said both of them had seat belts on and — at that point — she was more worried about her brother than herself.

“(At first) I didn’t want him to get out. I want to make sure that he was OK,” Jacques said.

“Thankfully, he was able to get out. I just pushed him to get him out of the car. He was able to get out with help and he pulled me out.”

Her brother was able to get out with help from a Chick-fil-A manager. Her brother was able to pull her out through a back window “because I couldn’t get out,” Jacques said.

She said she could not find her phone but her Apple Watch was able to activate her car’s emergency system that called the police. An ambulance later transported them to Piedmont Walton Hospital in Monroe.

“Everything hurts,” she said. “Trying to breathe, trying to move around.”

She also said she used her vehicle to do family errands, including assisting with another brother who is disabled. 

Now she is renting a vehicle and facing the task of working with her insurance company to buy a new vehicle, Jacques said.