Sylvia Jutila drives down Henderson Street a lot. It’s part of her usual circuit between St. Joseph Hospital and the Eel River Valley. A former director of the American Cancer Society’s local chapter, these days the 73-year-old Fortuna resident spends a lot of time as a volunteer driver, shuttling patients back and forth to their medical appointments in Eureka.

So she was doing just that Wednesday afternoon, driving a frail man in his eighties home from the doctor. The elderly gentleman was sitting in her passenger seat, and a couple of other people were in the back. At 3:40 p.m., they were passing St. Bernard’s High School in the left-hand lane when a tan SUV came up on their right.

Suddenly they heard a loud crack, and the passenger-side window exploded inward, raining shattered safety glass into the cabin.

“My friends thought for sure that it was a handgun,” Jutila told the Lost Coast Outpost this morning.

She pulled over and called the police and her insurance company. The cops arrived took a report. They removed the rest of the glass from her window, leaving it on the ground for a streetsweeper to pick up. Jutila arranged for alternate transportation for her elderly passenger, then drove home with the window broken out.

Was it a handgun? Jutila says she’s not so certain. She checked out the cabin of her car afterward and found no bullet. After talking with a friend in the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Jutila theorizes that it was likely a pellet gun. The pellet must have bounced off the glass when it shattered the window, she thinks.

In any case, Jutila is now back on the road. “I had the window replaced by 10:30 the next morning so I could drive another patient,” she said.

The Eureka Police Department didn’t return messages left about this case yesterday, and this morning a call to the officer in charge of press inquiries rang for several minutes without going to voice mail.