Transcript of I Was Just Waiting For The Gun To Go Off

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Another moment went by, and I was just waiting to hear the gun go off. I mean, like you would see in a movie. I was waiting for it.

Real people.

And if I lose it, we're gonna not only lose the three people in the water, we're gonna lose this vessel, and 26 people are gonna die who faced death.

That's when he grabbed me by the back of the neck and held out the knife and said, I'm sorry, but you have to come with me and.

Live to tell how maybe he's a.

Drug addict, maybe he's cracked out or something. He's, you know, possibly going to just say, screw it, and start shooting.

This is I survived. It's March 2000 in Kissimmee, Florida. Morgan and Aaron are baseball players trying to make it to the major leagues.

I was 23 years old, young ballplayer, minor league ball player for the Houston Astros, trying to make my way in the game. You know, every year I go to spring training and head off, pack my bag, and get everything I need for, you know, five or six months on the road.

It was actually my first spring training after a full season, and we're staying at a hotel, and the way the hotel is set up is it's kind of a rectangle. All the doors open to the outside.

So you could park in the parking lot and, you know, see the doors and see who's going in and out. Every single room was filled by a ballplayer, two ballplayers, to be exact. You had a roommate. So it was like a dormitory atmosphere, and really, you know, come seven, 809:00 you see a bunch of guys, doors open, guys going in and out of rooms and just enjoying, you know, being young.

In the second floor room next door to Aaron, Morgan was watching tv with six buddies.

Five or six guys are just sitting in the room, doors are open, watching baseball highlights of the day's games. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw that something just wasn't right. I saw a gun, and I saw two guys with ski masks. And my initial reaction was, is this a joke? Are there cameras? They came in, and they've just very calmly said, everybody get down on the floor with your face down. My heart just sank. And, I mean, I was scared. It was something that you definitely realized very quickly that we are in a lot of trouble. This is for real. He said, very calmly, put your hands behind your back.

The gunman started tying everyone up with zip ties.

He took our wrists and our ankles, pulled them together and then tied them. You can't believe it. You can't. We're getting hog tied. We are getting hog tied in a hotel room in spring training. What is going on here? They asked, okay, where's the stuff? And so people were telling them, okay, we got cd player over here. I had said, I have money in my pocket. And he came over, and I'm face down, and he put the gun to the back of my head, and he said, are you a hero? And I just, I mean, defeated. I said, no, man, I'm not a hero. And he's like, yeah, that's right. And then I heard them taking just the blankets that we have, regular hotel blankets. And he started throwing the blankets over each one of us. And I immediately said, they are gonna shoot blankets. That's what he's doing. He's doing it to eliminate the fact that this is a human being. And I was just waiting to hear the gun go off. I mean, like you would see in a movie. I was waiting for it. I was like, wow, I can't believe this is the way I'm gonna die.

As the blanket fell on me, it just kinda hit sideways. And I just remember, you know, snaking until I could get the blanket down to about my eye here, so that they could see all of my blonde hair, because I wanted them to know that you're not going to be shooting a bunch of blankets. You're going to be shooting a human being. And then instead of the gun going off, I heard, we'll be right back. And I could hear the door open. And right at that point, I thought, this is it. He's gonna shoot us. This is a trick. Moment passes. Nothing. Another moment. Door shuts.

One of Morgan's friends had been close enough to kick the door shut, unaware they were now locked out. The gunman went next door to burglarize Aaron's room.

I'm sitting on the bed, reading the magazine, just really relaxing, you know, thinking about what I'm gonna do. The next day, the door was kind of cracked open. I didn't shut it, you know, I shut it a little bit. It was still probably open a foot. And next thing I know, I saw a hand go on the door and open the door. Wide open. And then there. There was two guys in ski masks. Right away they said, where's your wallet? He went over, got it, took all the money out. I don't know. Maybe there was 100, $5200 in there. Then I heard the guy that was kind of the lead guy, the head guy, say, why don't you take him into the other room? And this just really confused me. I had no idea what was going on. He grabbed me, put the gun to the back of my head, and started to walk me down to the next room, Morgan's room. He tried to open the door. It was locked. And he seemed a little confused about that, and immediately put the gun right back to my head and walked me back into my room and put me face down on the bed.

They started kind of mumbling. I really couldn't hear what they were saying. Obviously, they were saying, you know, the door's locked. They're free. At that point, they started to get a little bit agitated. I have my face on the bed thinking, this is a bad situation, and I could end up really hurt or possibly dead.

When I look up, I see Eric on the phone. He is calling next door to his roommate, Aaron. And he gets on the phone and he says, hey, is Aaron there? And one of the guys who held us up picks up the guy that.

Was kind of the leader picks it up, doesn't say anything for a couple seconds, and says, he's in the bathroom right now. He'll call you back. And he hung up.

Eric looks at me and says, they've got Aaron. I grab the phone, and then I immediately dial 911.

Next door, the gunman prepared to escape with Aaron as a hostage.

The guy that was kind of in the lead gets at the front of the door, and he all says, okay, we're going to walk out, single file line. We're going to make sure nobody's going to run, nobody's going to do anything. Don't try nothing stupid. And as soon as he opens up the door, you see the cop cars pull into the parking lot. That was the greatest feeling at the time, to see the cop cars pull up in and to know that, okay, I'm not going to be leaving this area. And then real quickly, the guy that was in the front, he just went outside the room and jumped off the. Well, I guess it was the second story onto the ground. After he jumped off, the guy that was holding me pulled me back into my room and put me back on the bed face down. It changed from, oh, this is a nice situation. Having the cops this close to me to, I'm trapped in here with this guy who I have no idea his life story. Maybe he's a drug addict. Maybe he's cracked out or something, and he's, you know, possibly going to just say, screw it, and start shooting.

He kept saying to me, I'm not going back to jail. He wouldn't stop saying. And that really started to get me scared. I really thought that this guy had a really good chance of, you know, using me as a shield and having a shootout with the cops.

We heard a knock on the door. Hadn't heard any sirens, hadn't heard anything. And it was a police officer, and he had said, go, go, go.

Downstairs in the next room, Aaron was still being held hostage at gunpoint.

We're all sitting there, and then we are watching now as there are two police officers at the second level right next to Aaron's room. And they're just pounding the door, saying, open up, open up.

And he tells me, tell them I'm gone. So I would say, he's gone. And they would say, well, if he's gone, open the door. And then he would tell him, I hear say, tell him you'll open the door if they leave. So I said, I'll open the door if you leave. And he said, is he in there? And he said, tell him I'm not in here. No, he's not in here. Well, then opened the door. This kept going on for I don't know how long, 1015 minutes. And at that point, I thought, wow, this is the help just to open the door. This can't be right. You know, I'm thinking, where's the SWAT team now? I'm starting to think about the offensive and start to maybe think that, you know, I'm gonna fight back. This amazing amount of adrenaline that starts to build up in you as you start to think that you're going to do something like this. I pulled my head back, and I grabbed for the barrel of the gun. I quickly got ahold of it a little bit, and then he yanked it a little bit away, and I grabbed for the barrel of the gun again, and I got a complete good grip onto the barrel of it.

So in my head, all I was thinking of was, control the barrel of the gun. Make sure it's not pointing at me. I was a wrestler back in the day, so I said this. I'm going to use my wrestling skills, and I'm going to go right to the ground and put the gun right on the ground. And that's exactly what I did. Oh, my goodness. I have the gun. What do I do now? You know, where do I go from here? He had all his weight on me, and then I jump squatted him against the wall and proceeded to land on his chest. His back was on the ground, and my back was on his chest. And both of us had our hands on the gun. So we were basically, you know, on the ground, gun pointed at the ceiling like this. Finally, I realized the smart thing to do was to absolutely start yelling at the top of my lungs for these cops to get in here.

The first officer took the butt of a rifle and broke the glass that was next to the door of Aaron's room. The second officer jumped in, and you can hear him saying, put the gun down. Put the gun down.

He came up right above us, said, drop the gun. Drop the gun. He probably said it five or six times.

Finally, six bullets.

Pat. Pat.

And we just sat there. Aaron's dead. We just. We were certain of it. Aaron's dead.

The officer shot him six times, and he completely missed me. And the gunman's hand just. It kind of, like, melted off the gun, you know, it just came off.

Out comes Aaron yelling. And we ran upstairs and gave him, like, a big hug. And it was almost like this strange, ironic baseball celebration of winning the championship.

The gunman, Alexander Williams, survived and was sentenced to life in prison.

And he was the one that actually ended up ratting out the entire operation. Apparently, the plan was hog tie us, bring Aaron into the room, and then they were going to shoot us.

Morgan and Aaron both made it into the major leagues.

After the experience, baseball wasn't as big of a priority in a sense, and it kind of calmed me down, and I realized, man, you mean you can die so easily? And that's really when my baseball career took off. I don't know why I survived, like, specifically, but I do know that I was supposed to survive, and now I'm here.

I survived for a couple reasons, first one being my teammates ripping through their zip ties and being able to call the cops to come. And the other reason is my tenacity and will to live and the determination in my heart to come out on top and to not have my life taken from me.

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Fishing was slow, but we had really bad weather. We had about 50 knot winds for three days coming out of the northeast, and the weather was really sloppy. Seas were ranging from 2025 30ft. I wanted to make really sure that everybody was secured. The vessel was secured. We closed all the hatches because I knew we would be taking water. We took a wave on a starboard stern quarter that was very, very hard. It sounds like maybe a quarter stick of dynamite when it goes off because it's a solid impact hit, shakes the entire vessel. I knew the crew was going to be just furious because that means everybody's chasing their plates across the galley tables and food's going all over the place. They would call upstairs and start yelling, screaming.

Five minutes after the wave hit, the crew foreman came up to the wheelhouse.

He matter of fact, he told me, he said, captain, there's smoke down below. So I looked at him and I said, what kind of smoke is it? He said, well, it's smoke. It's just heavy smoke. It's black smoke. And I said, black smoke? And he said, yeah, it's black smoke. I said, well, can you give me a better definition of it? He says, yeah. He says, like the smoke that's coming out from behind the chart table right behind you. And I looked immediately to my left and then I looked immediately over to my right and I see smoke coming up from underneath the carpets by the walls, and it's starting to come in and fill the wheelhouse full of smoke. This, I knew, was something we had never dealt with before. It's already reached three levels up on the vessel coming up underneath the wheelhouse, from the walls, around the carpets. And so I immediately turned and I locked on the general alarm.

A serious problem down in the engine room was spreading smoke throughout the ship.

When you're out offshore a couple hundred miles on a vessel that's 190ft, you're the fire department, you're everything, and we have to take care of this. And then from a distance far off, somewhere in the. Somewhere in the vessel, I heard this and I went, what was that? And then we had a very large explosion. I had no idea where the explosion was. It rocked this vessel, this is a 1600 ton, 190 foot vessel. And the next thing I know is people are screaming, men overboard. And I see three of my people in the water with the prop wash from both of these great big, huge propellers. We're churning seven or eight knots, probably half throttle. I see my deck boss, I see my assistant deck boss, and I see my first mate in the water. These are the guys that I depend on every day of my life while we're at sea. These are the most trained, the most experienced. This is my a team, and they're in the water.

The explosion had blown the men overboard.

They're treading water in the bering Sea at 42 degrees. Their life expectancy is minimized now to five to ten minutes. And I'm still making way. Regardless of the fire, regardless of the smoke, the priority at this point is to get these three guys back on this boat. I turned, look back at the wheelhouse, and I saw the smoke was pluming going up into the air, 200, 300ft. The wheelhouse was completely black. It's pouring out of every orifice on this boat, and I've got to get back into this wheelhouse and clutch this thing out. In other words, I've got to take it out of gear. The first breath that I took going in, my lungs just seemed like they collapsed. They just stopped. My throat closed. And I remember just kind of grabbing my face, grabbing the controls, take it out of gear, turn around, get back up the stairs to go back to assist the operation of getting these guys back. And my crew members are standing there like shell shocked. They were just looking. Nobody's prepared for this. My level of confidence is going downhill rapidly, but I can't quit, I can't stop. I've got to run this crew, I've got to delegate, I've got to get these guys back.

And if I lose it, we're going to not only lose the three people in the water, we're going to lose this vessel and 26 people are going to die. Everything is brand new. Everything is coming at me at 100 miles an hour. And the outside of this vessel is engulfed in flames, shooting 30ft in the air all the way around the perimeter of the back of this boat. And as this is happening, we're going to drag these guys 1ft at a time through these flames to get them back up on the top of the boat. I've not made any radio calls. Nobody around us within 20 or 30 miles has any idea we're going through this. And as I'm going back down into that wheelhouse and I went down in there and I held my breath and I remember being in there looking, searching frantically for radios. Pitch black. The heat is intense. The smoke, I can't see. I've got a rag over my face. I'm trying to breathe. I get ahold of this one radio, mayday, mayday. And I'm throwing up and the snot's coming out of my nose and my eyes are burning.

And I'm going, may Day, mayday. And all of a sudden it's just a radio cord with a mic. It's already burned off the wall. And at this particular point, another explosion takes place and rocks this boat. The windows went out. All this debris in the air was floating and drifting and it was on fire. I wanted to just take a fetal position on the deck, which is a very, very strange feeling to have as a captain. And I wanted to just put my hands over my face and just hide and just wish that somebody, just anybody would take this burden from me because I knew that I was the only person. I knew that they were looking to me for how we're going to get out of this. And I just turn around and I start screaming at the crew again, we're going to make. We're going to make this where you follow my lead. You stay focused on what I'm telling you. We're going to make this. And in my heart, I already knew as a captain of 25 years fishing in the Bering Sea, we're not going to make this. Not one of us are going to survive this day.

And I'm screaming, where's Jerry? Where's Jerry, my first mate? And they said, we lost him. We've lost him. And I went, what do you mean we've lost him? I said, where is he? And I looked over the stern and Jerry was there. And I looked down at him and I'm screaming at him. He was swimming with one arm, kicking with one leg. And as he turned sideways and he just looked at me and his eyes rolled up in the back of his head and the white foam came from his mouth and he died. There was no way that I could help him, but I knew I couldn't quit. I knew I couldn't give up. The problems are getting worse. We're going to lose this vessel. I still haven't made a radio call. We have one survival raft on the right side of the boat, up on the top deck. We have another survival raft on the left side of the boat, up on top of the back deck. But it's totally engulfed in flames. The boat's continuing to blow up. We've had an explosion now. About every three to four minutes, there's a major explosion and things are coming apart at the seams.

I need to make a communication, so I've got to go back in the wheelhouse yet again. I had search and rescue radios velcroed to the ceiling of that wheelhouse that I hadn't used for years. And I reached up and I found one of those radios and I said, may Day, may Day, may Day. This is the fishing vessel galaxy. A voice came back over that radio as crystal clear as if that individual was in the room with me 2ft away. And he said, galaxy. He said, this is the coast Guard Loran station. Handheld radios are typically good for about 20 miles at best. That radio transmission went 35 miles, which to me was a divine intervention.

David staggered out to give the good news to the crew on the upper deck.

I said, I've made radio transmission. They know they're coming. They're coming, so we're gonna have to abandon ship. You just need to follow what I'm saying. But they're coming. And another explosion takes place. And I get launched right off the top of the boat, and I go 25ft down below and I land on the main deck. I remember laying there and it was this sound of bacon frying in a frying pan. It was just sizzling. Mirak and a couple of the others rushed to me to get ahold of me and pull me out of the flames were coming through the front of the boat.

David was now isolated with assistant engineer Mirek and two others on the main deck. The 19 men on the top deck struggled to launch the only life raft.

It seemed like maybe 15 or 20 minutes, and I heard somebody screaming, Dave, Dave, Dave. And I looked down through there and 20ft below me, the raft is coming. Bye. And there's people in the raft. So apparently they made it off the back of the boat. I just started screaming. Do you have everybody? Do you have everybody? Yes, Dave. Yes, Dave. And that raft was drifting probably at five or six knots. It was going very, very fast. Steve, right next to me, jumped up and dove from the top rail 20ft in the air as hard as he could go to get to that raft. And they pulled him inside the raft and they just disappeared. I watched them and it was quiet.

With the life raft gone, David and his two men had no means of escape.

Miraak says, captain. Captain. And I looked at him and I said, what, mirak? Are we gonna die today? And I said, yes, miraak, we're gonna die today. And Mirak jumped up and started screaming at the top of his lungs. And he said, captain, captain. He said, lights. He said, I see lights. They're coming.

The lights were the coast Guard helicopter. David was the last to be lifted to safety.

That chopper came back around again, and I remember that commander of that helicopter and that co pilot. And they were both grinning. They just looked at him and they said, okay, it's your turn. On the way up in the basket, I was looking at this situation that we just come through, not knowing how we survived that for two and a half hours, from the time of the first explosion to the time when we're actually being lifted out.

The men in the life raft were picked up by other fishing boats that answered the May Day call. David was transferred to a jet and flown to the hospital in Seattle, Washington.

I had three fractured ribs, and I had 1st, second, and third degree burns on my legs, my stomach, and my arms.

First mate Jerry George, the cook and crew member Jose did not survive.

The coast Guard, multiple times through the investigation after the fact, said that they have no idea how there should have been any survivors at all, that 26 people should have perished that day.

The investigators praised David and his crew for their bravery and heroism. The cause of the fire could not be established.

I survived because of training. I survived because it wasn't my time to go. And who did they have had I not made it? I was there for my crew and for my vessel. That was my responsibility. That's my obligation. I survived because of those things and my family and God was there with me.

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It's May 2010 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 19 year old Amanda is a clerk at a 24 hours convenience store. She's working the graveyard shift from midnight to dawn.

This old man came in and asked where the restroom was. So I pointed him in the direction of the bathroom. He had gray hair, he had facial hair and glasses, and he was fat and creepy. He was in the bathroom for quite a while. He came out, he left. There's been creepy people in the store before. They'd come in and get what they needed and leave. I mean, I was at work. I thought I was safe. About 04:00 the old man came in again, and he walked in. He went straight to the restroom, and I went about my business. And then about 20 minutes later, he had come out and he went over to try to get beer. So I went over to tell him that he can't get beer at 04:00 in the morning. He said, okay. And I grabbed it and I put the beer back where it goes. And that's when he grabbed me by the back of the neck and held out the knife and said, I'm sorry, but you have to come with me. The knife he had was like a kitchen knife. It was like this long.

The man walked amanda out of the store and up an alley.

We walk up through the next alley, across a church parking lot, and then through some backyards until we got to the back of an apartment complex. And he told me that if I said anything that had hurt me. And so I kept quiet and I kept walking. I was terrified. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what to do. I was scared he was gonna hurt me. So I listened. I did what he said. He unlocked the apartment door and pushed me inside and closed and locked the door behind it. The apartment was like an efficiency. It was one big open room with a little kitchenette next to it and a bathroom off of it. It was dirty. There was, like, newspapers all over the floor and buckets piled up and writing all over the wall. And then he had pictures taped to the wall. He told me to get undressed. It pretty made it clear what he wanted. And he raped me. After he raped me, he apologized and said that he's sorry he did what he'd done to me, that I am a beautiful woman and I shouldn't let any man hurt me, ever.

How someone can say to not let anybody hurt me when he's put me in the position he's put me in, angered me. I was man scared. What if. What if nobody knows I'm missing yet? And if they do, what is my mom and my dad thinking? I thought about if I would die, what they would do or what they would think, or if they would find me. Or if they don't find me, then what? He told me that he had been watching me for some weeks, that he knew the vehicles that had taken me to work. And he knew certain ways I worn my hair or specific people that would come in and talk to me. It was creepy. He said that cocaine was his drug of choice, and his only way to get a high is through sex, other than doing cocaine. I wanted to go home. And I asked him. He said, he's gonna let me go. He's gonna let me go, and he's gonna kill himself. And he just kept drinking. And he's like, as soon as I get up the nerve to do what I gotta do, he made me read things that he had written on the walls, like his dad took away his life, like his career and his children and his family and the army.

Just a whole bunch of junk just written all over the walls. He said that he had just gotten out of prison, I don't know, a couple months before that, and that he was in there for domestic abuse. He went over to the fridge and grabbed a beer, and he went and grabbed another knife, and he walked back towards me. I had that awful feeling in my stomach the entire time I was there. And the second I seen him having a second knife, it got three times worse. He kept trying to get me to come sit down next to him, to come near him, and I wouldn't do it. He set the knife down on a stand next to his bed, and he got up to go get a cigarette, I think. And that's when I grabbed the knife. And he started to come towards me, and I didn't. I panicked. I didn't know what to do, so I stabbed him. I got him in the lower chest area, and then I stabbed him again in the back shoulder area. And you could feel the knife coming in, getting caught on his skin. And then we end up on the ground fighting for the knife.

And so I held it like this with the blade in one hand and the handle in the other hand, so he couldn't get it from me. I didn't notice no blood when we were fighting until we were down on our hands and knees. And he's trying to get it, and I look down like this, and I see his chest area, and it was, like, oozing out of his chest like water out of a waterfall. It kept getting all up all over me. I had it all in my hair and all over my clothes, and my socks were just covered in it. It was very not okay. It was disgusting. And then he hit the back of my head, and somehow he managed to get the knife from me. I look, and there is a fan next to me. So I picked it up, and I hit him in the head chest area with it. And he stumbled backwards a little. And then he grabbed my work shirt, and I slipped it off over my head. And that was when I ran to the bathroom and shut the door. It wouldn't lock, so I sat with my back against it.

It was terrifying to sit in that bathroom, not knowing if anybody is coming, if anybody knows where I'm at. If he has the ability to actually get into the bathroom, what would happen if he did get in? He started yelling, talking about how I'm starting to really piss him off, that if he really wanted to get through the door, he could bust down the door at any moment. He came beating on the door, trying to get in, talking about, open the door. Let me in. Just open the door. It was terrifying. It scared me. Every time he'd say anything or do anything, it scared me. The next thing I know, somebody's pounding on the door, talking about, this is the police. Open up. And I hit the wall, and I screamed. And then I heard the police screaming at him, get on the floor. Get on the floor. And then somebody tried to open the bathroom door. That was when I moved and the lady cop led me out of the apartment.

A customer had alerted police to the unattended store and they looked at the.

Surveillance video and seen that somebody had taken me. They showed a picture of the man to the clerk across the street and he realized or he recognized who he was.

Amanda was taken to the hospital and given emergency contraception.

Six to eight weeks later, even after taking the morning after pills, I found out that I was pregnant. I thought a lot about when it grows up and what if it starts to look like him? Would I treat it any differently? But it's part me. I don't care what the other part is. The other part is part me.

A few days later, Amanda had a miscarriage. She has suffered from post traumatic stress since the attack.

I hope that there is a day that I can go without thinking about it. I cannot live on my own. If there is an older man anywhere near me, I freak out.

56 year old Keith Elson junior was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

I survived because I fought back. I did what I thought I had to do to make sure I was still here today. And I am.

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