A woman who prosecutors say hired a limousine to serve as a kind of getaway car from a brutal bank robbery in Ligonier last summer was indicted yesterday in federal court.

Sarah Blair, 34, of Windgap, was arrested the day after the Aug. 6 robbery at First Commonwealth Bank on Route 30.

According to an affidavit filed against her, Ms. Blair and two other men entered the bank about 9:30 a.m. wearing motorcycle and paintball helmets.

The robbers entered brandishing weapons and ordered the employees and a customer to lay face-down on the floor.

One robber tried to force a teller to open the vault.

"That teller was not able to open the bank vault and was immediately hit on the head by one of the robbers with the butt of a gun," the affidavit said.

Two other tellers then volunteered the codes to open the vault.

The robbers escaped in a rented SUV with more than $76,000. They drove to a nearby church and left the SUV there before getting into a limousine they had hired. They paid the limousine driver to take them to Washington, D.C. Later that evening, the driver returned to Pittsburgh and dropped the two men off at PNC Park. The other two men were not identified in the affidavit.

The next day, according to the affidavit, Ms. Blair and another man hired another limousine to drive them from Herndon, Va., back to Ligonier.

They were arrested in that limousine on Route 30 near where they had been spotted just after the robbery.

Police found $5,660 in Ms. Blair's shoes when she was taken into custody.

Police believe that just before the robbery, the suspects fired shots into a Dollar General store two miles away to divert attention from the bank.

The man in the limousine when it was stopped, Ricardo Brown, pleaded guilty to a firearms charge and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. He was not charged in relation to the bank robbery.