It wasn’t the safest place to pull over, but two women felt they needed to get out of their car immediately during the Tuesday morning commute.

The car was on the off-ramp of northbound I-5 at S 188th Street and was joined by a man in another vehicle when King County Sheriff’s Captain Bryan Howard pulled over to find out what the drivers needed.

“When I walked up and said, ‘what’s going on?’ The gal said, ‘That’s my car and we were driving down the freeway and a mouse ran across both of our laps. So we pulled over and we’re not getting back in that car,'” Howard explains.

According to Howard, with cars decelerating as they exit the off ramp from I-5, it didn’t make it the safest place for the drivers to be standing around.

But the driver refused to get back in her car – especially after another driver, a good Samaritan and former Boeing worker, had searched the car for the mouse.

The mouse had hidden itself in the wires of the dashboard and couldn’t be coaxed out.

“(The other driver) offered to switch vehicles with her and follow her to work,” says Howard. “They switched cars, he followed her into work so that she could call her husband and tell him to bring a mouse trap and some cheese.”

Her car, in case you’re wondering, is a “very nice BMW, very clean” according to Howard, and there was no apparent reason why there would be a mouse running around on the inside of it.

“In my 23 years,” says Howard, “I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before.”