ELBERTA, Ala. — Police Chief Mickey Pledger said it takes a lot to break a car windshield. Try to break one to pull an injured person out and you’ll see, he said.

That’s why the force of the large section of cinder block that came through Pledger’s windshield on Sunday night had enough force to kill him had it hit just right.

“An inch or two one way or the other,” is the way Pledger put it on Tuesday.

“The good Lord kept me safe,” he said.

But what about the emotional aftermath of such a close call?

“I feel like I’ve been run through a keyhole,” he said.

Pledger was on patrol Sunday night around 8 p.m. on U.S. Highway 98, just east of Old Foley Road, when a large section of cinder block struck his marked unit’s windshield. As Pledger puts it, the cinder block came through the windshield, struck a shotgun inside the unit at his shoulder, ricocheted to the unit’s computer stand and came to rest on the front seat. At some point the cinder block struck him in the shoulder and left a bruise, he said.

Pledger’s face and hairline were cut from the shattered glass of the windshield. He was taken to South Baldwin Regional Medical Center where he was treated and released.

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office is handling the investigation into the incident, one Pledger says is hard to imagine as an accident.

“I don’t see how it could happen,” he said of the projectile being being thrown with anything other than malice.

Pledger has years of law enforcement experience at the federal and local level. Before coming to Elberta as police chief, he worked for Homeland Security in Mobile and was a special agent for U.S. Customs in Florida.

Asked about anything comparable to Sunday night’s cinder block incident, Pledger said as a federal agent a contract was put out on him and his family by a drug dealer who lost millions of dollars in a federal seizure. The contract had gone so far that photos of their house and routes traveled by family members had been collected, Pledger said.

But Sunday night’s close call was something else, Pledger said.

The chief was taking Tuesday off, but said that was the only day he would be away from the job.

A news release issued Monday by BCSO said the early investigation led investigators to believe the cinder block was thrown from an oncoming vehicle and not from the roadside. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call BCSO at (251) 937-0202 or (251) 972-6802.