Jurors on Tuesday freed a Carthage man who had been accused of kidnapping a stranded Warren County motorist who jumped from his moving pickup along Mississippi 3 in April.

Both Johnny L. McMurry, 39, and Laurie Kistler, 27, testified in the two-day trial that ended after two hours of jury deliberation.

They agreed that she voluntarily entered his pickup, pulling a boat on a trailer on April 26 with Kistler testifying she had run out of gas a mile and a half or so from her home on Bell Bottom Road.

Kistler testified that McMurry locked the door and held a pistol to her head after passing the Bell Bottom intersection and a second road.

McMurry said there was a pistol in the vehicle, always in plain sight, that he missed the turnoff because the two were talking and that the second road was too narrow to allow him to turn around the truck and trailer. He said he was pulling off and slowing when Kistler jumped from the truck.

“What we are denying is that he kidnapped her,” McMurry’s attorney, Mitch Moran of Carthage, said during closing argument late Tuesday morning.

Kistler said she grabbed for the pistol after it was pointed at her, struggled with and bit McMurry, and then quickly unlocked the truck door and jumped out, running to a nearby home and calling 911.

“She let herself out of that truck,” Assistant District Attorney Mike Bonner said during his closing argument. “If she was going to get away, she had to do it herself. She saw her chance, and she took it. She would rather jump out, no matter how fast that truck was going, no matter where it was, than ride in that truck.”

McMurry was arrested later that day in Yazoo County and indicted by a Warren County grand jury.