Cold Case Files - I SURVIVED: I Looked Over and He Was Bleeding From the Chest

Episode Date: June 28, 2025

Gracia and her husband are abducted and held for ransom by the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. Richard is attacked in his home by a masked intruder with a knife. Michelle is impaled by a branch while on a wilderness ride with her husband.Apartments.com - To find whatever you’re searching for and more visit apartments.com the place to find a place.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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by independent optometrists. Hi, iSurvive listeners. I'm Marisa Pinson. And before we get into this week's episode, I just want to remind you that episodes of iSurvived as well as the A&E Classic Podcast Cold Case Files, City Confidential, and American Justice are all available ad free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now onto the show. This episode contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

The fear I felt in my heart was almost paralyzing. But when there's a gun at your back, you do what they told you to do. Real people. They all looked at me and their faces were just like, oh my gosh, what happened to this girl? And everybody started scattering. Who faced death. Allsie would say is, I ought to stick you right now.

That's all I should do is just stick you. Let's just get this over with. And live to tell how. I said, this isn't going to turn out well. We're sick of this. Why don't you take the money and let's all go home? But they were greedy. And they hardened their hearts.

This is I Survived. hearts. This is I Survived. It's May 2001 in Palawan, Philippines. Gratia and her husband Martin are Christian missionaries based in the Philippines. They run a flight program supplying tribal villages with food and medicine. My husband Martin was a missionary pilot, a jungle pilot. His job was to take food and supplies

and do medical evacuations from the tribal villages that we worked with. For the couple's 18th wedding anniversary, they booked a tropical island getaway. We left our children with coworkers on the island that we normally lived on and we told them we'll be back in one week. We got to Dos Palmas and it was a beautiful island resort, white sand beaches and had a nice meal, went to bed

that first night and early the next morning there was pounding on the door bang bang bang bang. Martin grabbed was pounding on the door, bang, bang, bang, bang. Martin grabbed shorts, headed for the door. Even before he got there, these three guys with M16s broke the door in. One came over to the bed and lowered his weapon at me and yelled, go, go, go. And I grabbed clothes and then they took me out too.

Our mission had kind of given us a little bit of training, what to do if you're in a hard situation like that. We'd always been told that at the beginning of a hostage situation, you comply and you do exactly what you're told. And that's what was on my mind. Do what they say to do. And they were saying, go, go, go, and I was going. The fear I felt in my heart was almost paralyzing.

But when there's a gun at your back, you do what they told you to do. They were taking all of us down to the pier to a waiting speedboat. And as we pulled away from the dock, they raised their weapons in the air. Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar. That's when we knew who had us. The Abu Sayyaf. They're a household name in the Philippines. Everyone knows who they are.

Militant Muslims who declared jihad in that area of the world, but their jihad is kind of degenerated into a kidnap for ransom group. And we knew we were in big trouble. The other hostages were just people that had been at the resort. Filipinos who were there for various reasons. There was one other American taken. He was a businessman from California. We were on a big speedboat.

It had three outboard motors on the back and we were, you know, pounding up and down so we were all kind of getting airborne just being slapped against the bottom of the boat. After 12 hours at sea in a small speed boat, the 20 hostages were forced aboard a filthy fishing boat. Water was a problem. There wasn't enough water on the boat and ended up drinking the fishy water, you know, as the ice melted from the catch. That was not pleasant. The Abu Sayyaf said to us, what do you do for a living?

They would kind of set a ransom goal for each person. They got to Martin and I and said, you will be political prisoners. We'll deal with you last. But as time went on, we saw that that really wasn't true. What they really wanted was money. — The rebel leader began negotiating with Philippine government officials for ransom money. — We didn't know how to play the game.

You pay the ransom, you go home. But we were kind of in this American mode, and of course Americans don't pay ransom. It's not fair. It's not right. The Abusayev got mad at the government negotiator in Manila. And to prove a point, they said, if you don't get us a new negotiator, in 72 hours, we will kill one of the whites. On the shore were probably 60, 80 Abusayev

with all their weapons waiting for us. I asked Martin, how long do you think this is gonna go on? He said, well, you know those other hostages that were taken a few years ago, I think that lasted for about six weeks. So in my mind, I thought, okay, worst case scenario, we'll be here six weeks. They told Martin, we will ask $1 million for you

and your companion can go free. That would be me, because women have no value in that culture. Within days of us being taken hostage, the other hostages started being released when a ransom payment would come. In the first 38 days of captivity, 11 Filipino hostages were released after ransom payments were made.

We thought we would be the targets. We would be the ones that were treated poorly because we were Christian missionaries and they were Muslims. They actually saw us as good people because we were there to help the poor and the needy. Who they targeted was the other American. They just labeled him as a bad guy right away. The other American hostage was Guillermo,

a tourist from California. Martin and Guillermo were always handcuffed at night together so they wouldn't run. This particular night, they came and handcuffed Martin to a tree and took Guillermo away. And as they were taking Guillermo away, he threw his stuff at me. He said, take care of my stuff till I get back. And they took him off. I kind of figured those were Guillermo's last words. I told Martin, they've killed Guillermo.

And he said, oh, no, you can't. You can't think that. But later, we asked Suleiman, one of the leaders of the group, if Guillermo was dead. And he said, we released him without his head. They beheaded him. Just to prove a point, just to gain control, it was needless, a totally needless thing. But that's when we knew they meant business. Then we knew truly the depths of the trouble we were in.

Exhausted and starving, the eight remaining hostages were marched into the mountains to avoid the Philippine army. The military was down in the lowlands, you know, where the villages were. So we would hike high up into the mountains, where the military wasn't going to come because it was hard hiking to get up there. But we would starve up there. There was no food. There were no fruit trees. There was nothing. You dreamed of food all the time, but you just kept putting one foot in front of the other foot. You just had to keep going. Sleeping rough on the jungle floor, the hostages survived on tiny portions of rice and any fruit they found.

There were many days we had nothing to eat. At one point we went nine days without food. I didn't know you could go nine days without food. I thought you go three days and you drop dead, but you don't. We drank whatever we could find. We would just drink from muddy streams. We would drink from rivers. Whatever we could find to stay alive, we drank.

We got diarrhea and dysentery, and there was no place to clean up. And we started to starve, and we started to look more like animals than human beings. The Philippine Army used aggressive tactics in their attempts to free the hostages. Of course they were trying to rescue us, but we learned that they didn't know anything about hostage rescue. They would Rambo-style shoot up the camp. There was never selective gunfire with the Philippine military. They would find us and they would just empty their guns, their rounds. They would just spray, shoot up the camp,

and we knew our days were numbered. We knew that we wouldn't survive many of those gun battles. On the run from the Army, the Abusayev invaded a local hospital. We burst into the hospital, broke all the windows, and took hostages there. One by one, they let the patients go, but then the military just started bombing from overhead

and shooting at us and the hospital was a war zone. The Army attacked the hospital firing mortars from a helicopter. At one point when they started bombing us, we all hit the ground and pulled a sheet over us. And I started blacking out. I just had enough. And I told Martin, you know, maybe I'm going to die here, but I can't lay in this blood.

I thought at least I'll die with my head up. After attacking the hospital for two days, the Philippine army pulled back and the terrorists escaped. I began begging God not to make us go through any more gun battles because they were traumatizing. And in those gun battles we would have dead, we would have wounded that we needed to deal with until we could get to a Muslim village where they could handle the problem. They were awful, every single one of them.

The hospital siege was the first of 17 gun battles the terrorists would have with the military. One day I had just washed some things at the river. We'd hiked back up and thrown our wet clothes over the bushes to dry, and the gunfire started in on us. The military had found us again, and we had to run and drop and run and drop and leave all of our stuff behind.

We lost everything. The emotional rollercoaster was awful. They would tell us every week, Friday there will be news or Friday you will be released. And our hopes would get up and we would live for Friday. And then Friday nothing would happen. There were some days I would sit and I would say Martin I'm done. I'm not going on. They can shoot me if they want to but I'm finished and Martin would say, Gracia what would the kids say if you had a

phone right now? They would say, Mom keep going today because tomorrow you might get to go home. Gracia and Martin wondered if they would ever see their three children again. Our children were ages nine, 11, and 13 when we were taken hostage. And we wondered about them, but I didn't allow my mind to worry about them

because if I had gone there in my mind, I would have been paralyzed with fear or it would have been emotional overload. I just couldn't think about my children. I just kept telling myself, they are fine. We talked about escape, but we weren't going to escape unless we were sure we could get away, if we could kill the guard or whatever that was with us,

we had to be sure to get out of there because they always told us, if you try to escape, we will kill you. And we didn't want our children to grow up orphans. Using their missionary training, the couple built friendships with their captors. God started changing my heart. He started letting me see these kids, I call them the kids, for who they really are. Not all of them were bent on jihad.

I think there was this great disconnect between them being terrorists and them being our friends because we almost became a family, which makes no sense at all. And we always said, you know, who are the good guys? The good guys are the ones coming in, shooting at you. Who are the bad guys? The bad guys are the ones feeding you,

shielding you in a gun battle, and telling you what to do. When you live with someone and you walk with them and you endure terror with them, you kind of become a family. But they were the enemy, but on the other hand, they were our family. Another six months of intense suffering passed with no sign of freedom. The year mark was really low for us. We couldn't believe we were still there after a year. We were weak. We were exhausted. Every day we would say this cannot get any worse and then it would get worse and I found myself just stuffing the emotion of everything back somewhere in my mind. We told stupid stories. Martin would sing me funny songs.

He often sang songs to get me to sleep because I couldn't sleep well. And he would sing me to sleep. They let all the remaining hostages go except Martin and I and a Filipina nurse named Edibborra. They kept us three and let everyone else go. Finally, news of a ransom payment filtered into the camp. This is it. It's what we've been waiting for. The leaders all sat around deciding what to do.

And then they called Martin and I and we sat down with them and they said, someone's paid a ransom for you But we decided it's not enough and we're gonna ask for more and I begged them not to do that I said this isn't gonna turn out well. We're we're sick of this. You're sick of this Why don't you take the money and let's all go home, but they were greedy and they hardened their hearts We started thinking that neither of us would get out of there alive. We started planning life without each other. My goal in life had always been to grow old with Martin and that's what happened in the jungle. We

grew old. We started looking old and wrinkled and shriveled and we started walking like old people. We had to move slower and we couldn't run as fast. There never seemed to be a plan and that's what bothered me. Here we were running out of energy, we were getting thinner and thinner. We were this ragtag group with no plan. The harsh living conditions also caused some of their captors to lose hope. A lot of the Abusayev started going AWOL. The leaders, of course, were committed because there was a fat paycheck at the end for them,

but they even got sick of it. Late one night, we decided to cross a road. Well, I knew that was a bad mistake because we would leave our tracks. The next morning, we realized that we were being followed. The Philippine Army had located the Abu Sayyaf hideout and closed in. One of the unwritten rules between the Abu Sayyaf and the military was they never fought in the rain. And this was the tropics, it was clouding up to rain.

So we thought we were okay, so we stopped and put up our hammocks and put up our plastic sheeting to wait out the rain. And the military didn't stop. They came over the hill, and I think we surprised them as much as they surprised us, and they just opened fire on us, and it was just instantaneous gunfire like it had always been. Indiscriminate, Rambo style, shoot up the camp, shoot or be shot. Before I could even get to the ground I

was shot in the leg and fell out of the hammock and slid down the hill because it was slippery and wet, and I came to rest beside Martin. And I looked over at him, and he was bleeding from his chest. I don't know how long that gun battle lasted, but I was trying to do what Martin had always taught me in a gun battle.

Stay down until someone tells you what to do. I was trying to look dead. Sometime during the gun battle, I felt Martin's body get very heavy. The weight of death, I think, is what I felt, but I didn't know. I'd never seen a person die. The soldiers came down and drugged me up the hill,

and as they were dragging me away, I looked at Martin, and he was white. That's when I knew he was dead. As I left Martin laying in the rain, I just remember having a real peace because one of us was going to get to go home and raise our children and that's what we'd been begging God for and, you know, that's not the answer I would have chosen. Martin Burnham died from a single gunshot wound to his chest. A helicopter came in and took me to a U.S. Army field unit and it was American military personnel and I was so glad to see them.

And they did surgery right there. And then right away after they found my children, I was able to call the children and I wanted them to hear details from me about their dad's death. I know I wouldn't have survived this experience without Martin there to just keep me going, keep me focused, kept telling me, keep going today, tomorrow you might get to go home. I have Martin to thank for getting through that. He was a good man. I survived because Martin kept me going in the jungle and because God had mercy on us. Finding the one can feel impossible. And in today's world, it's even harder.

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No more swiping and awkward first dates. Make it easier to get a place that gets you. Visit apartments.com, the place to find a place. It's February 2009 in Standish, Maine. Richard is a builder working on a new house in the middle of winter. Finishing early on Saturday, Richard heads home. Did a little grocery shopping on the way and it was about an hour commute. I probably got home around 2 o'clock, 2.30. Richard lived alone in a small lakefront cottage, five minutes drive to his neighbors. It's very peaceful, very rural, and very quiet, particularly in the wintertime.

Lay down on the couch, turn the TV on. At this time, still light out. That was it. I just fell asleep. The next thing that I remember is a man standing over me just screaming. And the gist of it was money. I want your money. I was looking up at this guy.

At this point, he's got a mask on. I don't know who this man is. You know, it's just total shock. The intruder jabbed a gun against Richard's face. I'm in a world of trouble here right now. I grabbed the object from the side of my head. It turned out to be a barrel of a toy gun. It could have been a broomstick for all I knew.

And in the process of doing that, he came at me. We both went over my coffee table in front of the couch. That was in splinters. And it was just punch for punch, one after the other. Me, then him, then me, then him. I do remember going down to the ground, and that was the first time I saw a knife. Not was I only out-fisted here,

but now there's a knife in the equation, and it turned out to be not like a hunting knife or anything like that. It was like a knife you carve a turkey with, 12 inch blade, and he stabbed me in the back next to my kidney. He missed. I think it was almost shock had set in at this point.

It's like, whoa, this has escalated way beyond a simple robbery. This guy is out to hurt me. He got the knife to my throat and he was directly behind me at that point. Without even thinking, I grabbed the end of the blade with my hand and pushed it away that way. The blade sliced Richard's hand to the bone.

I'm in a ball on the floor and he's just sort of circling me. No fists at this point, just his feet, just a barrage, one after the other after the other. He's got three, four inches on me. He's probably twice as wide as I am. He's got me by age, he's got me by size, by strength. It's a no match, it's a no brainer. There is absolutely no point in prolonging this fight. I've lost, you know, I am bleeding from everywhere. When I tried to get up and get to my knees,

I knew there was something seriously wrong because of my back, I just couldn't move. Any chance that I thought I might be able to run for the front door or the back door was gone. He left the room and he went in a very short distance into my kitchen and left me laying on the floor and I stayed there for a minute, could have been five minutes. He just kept rambling on about money, what he was going to do is go into Europe. He had another job lined up there. Bleeding heavily, Richard crawled to his couch and listened as the intruder ransacked the kitchen.

I don't know if he expected to open one of my cabinet drawers and find thousands of dollars just sitting there It's like are you kidding? Alls I want is him out of the house You can take anything you want here. I said my wallet was on the table I said there's credit cards in there. My truck is out there. The keys are in it. He's desperate. He's cold. He's broke.

He's hungry. He could be on drugs, or he could just be mentally disturbed. I don't know. I've been very careful with what I say not to aggravate him. And he's got a 12 inch knife. So I am not going to in any way try to piss this guy off any more than he already is.

Frustrated at not finding money, the intruder demanded that Richard drive him to a gas station. I just flat out said no. I can't even get up, really get off this couch. I am not going anywhere with you. You know, I need a doctor is what I need. He's obviously totally broke, not a penny to his name, but he's confused. I don't think he knows what exactly to do. He's not all right. He's not a together human being. The intruder's behavior became bizarre.

He wanted a mop to try to clean this place up. The kitchen and the bathroom are a bloody mess. There's blood on the walls, on doors. The floor is just completely covered with my blood. I had a little dry mop thing. I told him where it was. He used it for just a couple minutes, maybe not even that long, and realized that he was making more of a mess. He was making things worse.

I thought he was just out of his mind. That's what's making you happy, keeping you away from me, and keeping that you away from me and keeping that knife away from me, you go ahead and you mop all night. At some point during his mopping adventure, he realized that he was covered in blood as well.

He goes, I gotta wash my clothes. He literally strips down, puts all his clothes in the washer, gets it going. I made the mistake now, and I regret it, of asking him, well, who, what's your name? That was not a smart thing for me to have done. He just was enraged. It was much worse than the fight and actually being stabbed. But now it's a whole different story. Now I know where he's coming from.

Now he's got this knife waving in front of me. Alls he would say is, I ought to stick you right now. That's all I should do is just stick you. Let's just get this over with and just stick you. I did everything I could to calm him down verbally. Absolutely everything. Like, look, let's go back. You don't want to do this type thing.

You're going to regret it. He goes and starts getting dressed. Back to his outdoor gear, his clothes are as clean as he can get them. And he tells me that he is going to take me into bedroom and he's got to tie me up. He duct taped my ankles together very tightly and then told me that he was going to tie my legs together. But he didn't use the duct tape.

He used a piece of rope. Richard heard the intruder leave the bedroom and make some phone calls. I don't know if he's going to come back in the room with the knife or he's on his way out the front door. A period of time passed. The house is quiet. I knew there was only going to be two outcomes. One, he was going to leave this house and make a run for it. Or two, he was going to come back in that room with that knife and kill me. I got to try to make a move here. So in a matter of no time at all, with my teeth, even though the two front ones were knocked out, I managed to get the tape off my wrist very, very quickly.

Richard hobbled into the kitchen unsure if the intruder was still present. I could see out my front window and door. My truck was still there. I couldn't believe it. Now he could be right outside the front door, but he is not in the house. After cutting his legs free with a kitchen knife,

Richard grabbed the spare key to his truck. It took me a little while to get in, but got into it and within minutes I was down the street with my neighbors. I didn't knock or anything, I just plowed through the front door. The woman of the house just took one look at me and just started screaming. Chris just came bolted downstairs and the two of them, I think, were both on a cell phone at this point, 911. The next thing, I'm in the back of an ambulance on my way to a trauma center. Richard suffered multiple stab wounds, broken ribs, and required facial reconstruction.

Ephraim Bennett was apprehended two hours later and sentenced to 27 years in prison for the attack. I survived because I just, I wouldn't quit. I just kept trying and kept hoping as much as trying that the outcome of this would be life as opposed to me being dead. If and if so, has the government been covering it up? All right, UFO sightings the military can't explain. Congressional hearings, Pentagon whistleblower. What does it all mean? What does it all mean? We are here to try and figure it all out

with our new Ancient Aliens podcast. There is a doorway in the universe. Beyond it is the promise of truth. It demands we question everything we have ever been taught. The evidence is all around us. The future is right before our eyes. We are not alone. We have never been alone. Listen to the Ancient Aliens podcast available wherever you get your podcasts. It's September 2009 in Kamiya, Idaho.

20 year old Michelle and her husband, Daniel, take a scenic drive on a Saturday morning. The couple's plan is to follow the Loxaw River into the Idaho wilderness, two hours away. You had to have a have at least a pickup. And most times, in most seasons, probably four-wheel drive, we were in four-wheel drive on this day. We went really slow all the way up. We were looking at the mountains, looking for animals,

looking just, we went really, really slow all the way up there. By the time we did get up there, the Locksall Lodge, their little store was open, so we stopped to get chips and pop and things, and he topped off the tank. It was a bright, sunny day, so the couple took time to check out the scenery.

We stopped at a creek, and he went down to the creek and we went and looked. It was kind of cool. There was a little waterfall in this little creek thing, and we were probably there for 10 minutes or something. And we got back in the truck and there was like, you know, rocks growing in the road that had fell off the banks and trees that were just kind of laid in the ditches.

This was like the Montana wilderness. I mean, this was just huge green, green trees everywhere. We were probably going 10, 15 miles an hour, which is kind of fast for that kind of road. We were really laughing like hysterically. My mouth was wide open and I was laughing so hard. And all of a sudden, like everything just stopped. A stray branch had burst through the window of the car,

pinning Michelle to her seat. There was just branches sticking all over the place. I mean, I could not see. I could not move at all. Like, I was pinned completely. And all I could feel was, like, pressure. Like, horrible pressure. And I said, where is it? My husband goes, it's in your neck. There was a branch in my neck. Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? It went in, like right here. There's, it went into here and it kinda went sideways out to about right here and it was pushing my skin, but it wasn't exactly like poking through it yet.

I immediately grabbed it just as reaction. And when I grabbed it, I seen him come gonna grab it and I just said, don't touch it. Daniel was screaming, like awful scream. I've never heard anything like that. My husband did all of a sudden start talking to me and saying, I love you and kind of like goodbye without saying you're dying, you know, but that's what he thought. I kept getting irritated that he was talking to me, but it felt good at the same time that he was talking to me because I'd have to answer and it would hurt.

The nurse hospital's two and a half hours away and there's no cell phone service until you get to the town where the hospital is. I tell my husband, you know, you have to get me to the lodge to a phone. I need to call an ambulance. I need the helicopter. I was telling him all the stuff I needed. I had my hand on it the whole time and I never took it off.

And when I was trying to comprehend what was happening, kind of closed my eyes and was like, if I'm gonna die, I'm just gonna do it now. It's only eight to ten miles away, but with this stick in my neck, we can only go so fast. It wasn't a gravel road at all. It was kind of like there was grass and rocks and trees and it was worse than just bumpy.

I mean, you were going over top of like boulders and things like that. Michelle's husband, Daniel, was so shocked by her injury that he struggled to drive. We were going around a corner right after we started driving, and he goes, I'm gonna pass out. And I said, no, you can't pass out. You gotta get me to a phone.

He just kept saying, I love you. And when he would say, I love you, you could hear that he was cracking and crying in his voice. I had never seen him with that look on his face. I have never seen anybody with that look on their face ever. My husband asked me, you know, you want me to roll your window up? No, I don't want to see myself. I can't see myself.

And I thought I was going to die. Driving slowly, their only hope was to reach the wilderness lodge and raise the alarm. We get down to this bridge and it is completely packed, crowded, full of four-wheelers. We couldn't get through it. And Daniel's out the window screaming, get out of the way, get out of the way. Once we got stopped, they all looked at me, and their faces were just like, oh my gosh,

what happened to this girl? And everybody started scattering. They were screaming, go, go, go. It's gonna take us an hour, an hour and a half to get there to even get help on the way. It was starting to like sting around the outside. More than anything my jaw, where these little tiny branches were poking into, were just sore. It was so sore. It hurt so bad. It felt like a broken bone was pressure, Like hundreds of pounds of pressure just on this collarbone is what it felt like. This branch was underneath the collarbone

and kind of with the leverage of the weight on it, it was kind of just pulling, like pushing on my collarbone like up. And so that's why there was so much pain there. After an hour driving along old logging tracks, the couple pulled into the lodge. There was people looking and opening their mouths and covering their mouths and things like that. And I'm getting a little more scared because it would just get scarier and scarier.

I waited forever for Daniel to come back out of the lodge. I was like, what's going on? Don't they have a phone? I know they have a phone. What's taking so long? Does he not want to be out here? Is he just, what's going on? Don't they have a phone? I know they have a phone. What's taking so long? Does he not want to be out here? Is he just, what's going on? And then finally this lady comes up to me. She ran out of the lodge. She was in there talking to Daniel.

She goes, Daniel's not doing very good, honey. He's trying to calm down. He doesn't want to see you right now. He can't look at you. She put her hand on the other side of my neck and checked my wrists and was checking vitals. And she goes, have you blacked out? And she kept asking me, what's my husband's name?

When is my anniversary? When's my birthday? What's my sister's name? Just tons of questions to try to keep me coherent. Just take care of me. Don't make me do this anymore. Where's the helicopter? Where's the ambulance? Where's the first response? Where's something? I need something.

I have branches poking in to my jaw. I don't want to talk. I was kind of mean, but I was starting to get pain, and she let me be mean to her. It was so sore. It hurt so bad. I mean, even more than the pressure on my shoulder. I was getting really upset. Like I was actually at this point, like getting so mad that I was getting teared up because I was getting so like mad because I was starting to hurt.

Michelle's spirits were raised when she heard the rescue helicopter land. And so then I have like four or five different people coming at me to touch me and I'm screaming, don't touch me, don't touch me. I was really, really scared that somebody was gonna touch my stick. The helicopter guys would not let me walk.

They didn't want me walking. They wanted, you know, to move me themselves, and I wouldn't let them. I kind of just turned around and jumped out of the truck as fast as I could. I was completely like, oh my God, I can walk. I can't believe I can walk. I can do this.

I can do this. They were cutting branches with these scissors and every time they would cut, it would wiggle. And I was screaming, stop, stop, that hurts. That hurts. Quit doing that. Don't touch it. Finally said, I've been coherent for, by this time, three and a half hours and I am ready to go to sleep. I want to wake up and this be over.

And all of a sudden I see this white cloud coming at me and it's the anesthesia. It took surgeons seven hours to remove the branch from Michelle's neck. The way that branch was shaped, it moved every artery, every vein, everything. They don't know how it missed, like those main arteries in there. And if they would have hit them, I was so far from the hospital, I would have been done. I survived because I stayed calm, I stayed aware, I stayed alert. And I was fighting for myself and for the person next to me. This summer, Pluto TV is exploding with thousands of free movies.

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