The man that had my sister
with the gun behind his back told the other one with the
ski mask, "now shoot him." I see this mountain of
snow bearing down on us, and I know that
it's an avalanche. He holds a gun
to my head and he says, "you are
going to die today for what you've done to me." It's like your
life's a movie almost. It's like you're in
watching a horror movie. It was my mom's favorite
place on earth to be. She loved getting
away from Texas, being able to be in a snow
covered white Christmas, and that was our family dream. We looked forward
to that every year to get to be able to spend our
Christmas vacation together in the mountains
with our family. My grams and I started
on our snowmobile journey up to the cabin, my mom
following behind us. As we got up to the cabin,
my hands were freezing so I jumped off, asked mom
to hurry and open the cabin. I needed to go run my
hands under some water. I made my way up the
stairs, opened the door, and I saw a flash of gray
move behind the refrigerator. And the next thing I knew, there
was a man pointing a revolver at me saying, "get in
here, get in here." A second man comes
out with thick glasses behind the bedroom, pointing
another big black gun at me, and they both
immediately started asking me who was
with me, and I said, "my mother and my
handicapped grandmother." Immediately after mom and grams
were brought into the cabin, mom said to them,
"what are you here for? What do you want?" My mother just began
to have a conversation and the man immediately
started to fire at her. And I can remember her grabbing
across her chest and saying, "I've been shot." I see my mom go down and then
seconds after that I look over to my shoulder and see my
grandmother fall after her head had been blown off, and
then it was dead silence. I couldn't understand
what was happening. I was in a state of shock. You just can't even fathom that
this-- it's like your life's a movie almost, just like you're
in watching a horror movie. One of the men physically went
and threw up in the bathroom, because he said there
was so much blood. I started to pray out
loud for it to stop, and the man with
the fuzzy hair told me to shut up about praying,
that it wouldn't work. He was a devil worshipper. The man with the thick
glasses took me back to the back bedroom and
tied me, put duct tape, a sock in my mouth, duct
tape around my mouth and duct taped my wrists and
ankles together. And they were in a state
of kind of confusion. They weren't kind
of sure what to do. They were talking about
how to get the bodies out of the cabin. Wanted to destroy-- start to put
the cabin on fire so they could destroy all their evidence. Immediately as we
got to the garage, the noise of the snowmobiles
started to make its way up the driveway. The man in the gray sweatshirt
grabbed me around the neck and put his gun to my
back and held me tight as we waited for my dad and
sister to come in the door. The other man ordered
them in at gunpoint to come into the garage. I observed my dad and
my sister coming in, and my sister, eyes big, just
looking at me like, what, you know, what's going on? We saw the one
guy with his arm around my sister's neck
and a gun to her back. And the other one that
jumped out with the ski mask had a gun drawn on us. "Be quiet!
Be quiet!" And they obviously were
flustered and then surprised and didn't know
what was going on. And my dad says, "what
do you guys need? What do you guys need?" And I said, "do you want money? Dad, give them money." "Yeah, yeah, we want money." And slowly my dad
unzipped his snow vest and reached into his billfold
and threw it on the ground. And as soon as he did that, the
one guy said, "now, shoot him." The winter of 2007 was not
a good snowmobile season. The snow was minimal. We like to have lots of
snow as snowmobilers, and lots of big, fluffy snow,
and 2007 was not that year. We still went every weekend, but
we just didn't have really good conditions. This particular day, the night
before it had snowed a lot. And it was only the three
of us, the three of us were experienced riders, and
it took experienced riders to get to this bowl. After two hours traveling,
we finally get to our spot that we want to be in
snowmobiling, the one that we've been after for years. It's this 100 acres,
un-treed, steep, cliffed area that snowmobilers love to be in. Snowmobiling is
going up and trying to get as high as you can. That's what we're doing
in this particular bowl. It's steep, and you're not
going to make it to the top. It's just-- you're not going to. It's vertical at the top. The competition here
is to see how high you can get on this
mountainside, and that's how we outdo each other. This particular time, Brett
got stuck on his highmark. And I went up there to
help him get unstuck. I did the same thing-- I pulled out right
below him, got stuck. And as soon as I jump off my
snowmobile, I look up at him and I see him take two
big lunges towards me like something,
something's not right. And he falls down on his belly,
and I know definitely something isn't right. Immediately draws my
attention up the hill, and I see this mountain
of snow bearing down on us and I know that
it's an avalanche. Even though I felt
uncomfortable around him, I had spent a lot
of time training him and I saw a lot of
potential if we can work around this little issue
he had going on. So I wanted to keep him. I felt like it was a
little high school crush. I didn't know why
he was doing this, but I felt like I had control. Within a couple of
months, after he gave me the flower and the poem and the
cassette tape for Mother's Day, I just, I thought no, I'm,
I'm not calling him for work anymore. You know, I can't
put up with this. He would continue to call me. He called me at home. He wanted me to meet
him with the kids, with my kids, which were at
the time just two and three, at a park because
he wanted to see me. And I said, "no,
absolutely not." I was married and I was not
interested in anybody else. A few more months passed and
there was minimal contact from him. And then he called me three
times one morning at work, and each time I hung up on him. The last time he called he
said, "what about that baby you promised me?" And I thought to
myself, oh my gosh, this guy has really lost it. He, he'd-- I mean, how bizarre. Why would he think that? And I was, I was
afraid at that point. So we put a phone
block on the phone so he couldn't call
me at work anymore I said, "you know, I have a
restraining order on my desk. All I have to do is go
get it signed again, and then we will
track you down." I said, "you have
to leave me alone. You can't keep
doing this to me." Almost four months went by and
I didn't hear anything from him, so I thought, good. So we took the phone
block off the phone. Two weeks later, he came into
the store and into the room where I was. And I had my back to the
door, and he comes up and he grabs me by
the back of the neck and he says, "I got
to talk to you." I had no idea who it was,
so I jumped out of my chair and saw who it was and he
pulls a gun out of his pants. The man that had my sister
with a gun behind his back told the other one with the
ski mask, "now shoot him!" And he sat there and his gun
was drawn, and he sat there and he shook, he
goes, "shoot him!" And the one with the ski mask
drew the hammer back and aimed and clearly was having
a hard time doing it. So the other one
that had my sister pulled his gun out and
aimed at him, fired twice, and it misfired, the third
one went off and hit my dad and my dad fell. And my sister and I
ran to each other. I held her tight
and I said, "Linae?" She just stayed silent. I said, "Linae-- mom?" She shook her head.
"Gram?" Shook her head. And I said, "are
they both dead?" She shook her head yes. I just hold her tight and I
said, "it's going to be OK. It's going to be OK." And at that moment
the feeling to survive kicked in almost like an animal
instinct, something I never experienced and don't ever
want to experience again. And right then our
minds came together and we knew we had
come up with a plan. So Linae and I
immediately started doing what they told us to do. I remember having-- on the snowmobile ride,
thinking, OK, my dad is dead, my mother's dead,
my gram's gone. I'm the oldest in
the family and now I have this huge responsibility to
take care of my little sister. As we were driving,
I was in front and my sister was behind me. And I thought, all I have to do
is go fast and turn and throw this guy into a tree. And then I remembered,
I can't do this. I can't leave my sister. I recognized his, his vehicle. I remember just feeling,
Linae, you just gotta be quiet. Don't-- you know,
we can't scream out. I just felt just not to
make known that we knew him, that he was family. I was fearful that
they would kill him. So we passed Randy
and just kind of gave him a very basic
wave and nod as we would with anyone to be courteous. Passed through and crossed the
road to get to the other side where the sheds were
and where the car was. So we begin loading up
and immediately Linae and I just looked at each other. We knew we had to hurry. We had to hurry, because if
these guys knew that my Uncle Randy was there and he was-- we knew him, then they would
probably kill him as well. I feel ice chunks and
snow covering me up. As the snow is covering me, I
can see the daylight fading, and the deeper that I
get into the avalanche and into the snow. And as I move down the hill,
I could feel myself moving throughout the snow pack. I can see daylight
showing through. I know I'm close to the surface. And then it will get dark and
it'll be dark for a little bit, and then pretty quick I
can see daylight again. I know I'm close to the surface,
and then it'll be dark again and I know I'm getting
a little bit deeper. In all this, my
helmet was ripped off, you know, there's not
much air in my lungs at this point in time. I'm trying to swim
like that experts say you're supposed to do. This stuff is hard to swim in. It's solid and you
just can't move in it. I feel my snowmobile
tumble over the top of me. It cartwheeled over
the back of my leg. But really I didn't even feel
the pain at that point in time, it was just all
happening so fast. I've heard that, you know,
you can help yourself stay alive a little bit longer
by creating that air pocket, so I'm just bringing
my hands up to create that air pocket and everything
stops moving and then I can't move. I'm just solid. I'm in there. I mean, literally I'm
on my way to my face and I just, it's just like
I was frozen in this snow. I can't move. When I saw that gun, I mean,
part of me was total panic, you know, I need
to get out of here. But I think part of me, I really
thought, I can control this. I, you know, I, I, I can
somehow get out of this. I wasn't sure what was going
to happen, but I, you know, I don't know. I wasn't in total panic. I mean, I know I wanted to get
out of there, but I really-- at the time, I really didn't
think that he was going to pull the trigger right then. I didn't know what to do. So I made eye contact
with this other. One other male
employee that we have, and he and I dashed
for the door. He was going to call
9-1-1, obviously, and I was just
trying to get away. So we were out the
door and, you know, several, several feet,
maybe 10 feet or so, away from the store. And sure enough, Jociel
was right on my tail and he knocks me
down and drags me right across the
sidewalk, up the step, and back into the building. And there I laid on the
floor right in this walkway, and people were scattering
and, you know, calling 9-1-1, going under their desks. And he holds a gun
to my head and he says, "you are
going to die today for what you've done to me." When we were in the car and we
began speaking with these men, it wasn't an objective
make friends with them, it was to be casual. Get them to be comfortable and
get information out of them so they're not freaking out and
making decisions that we can't anticipate. It was a very quick
thought process of what do we need to do to survive? What do we need to do to
understand the situation so we can get out of it? We've got to stop this car. We've got to stop proceeding,
because my uncle just saw us. At some point he's going to
clue in that those girls went somewhere they
shouldn't have gone, so we've got to slow
down the situation. So immediately I say, "I
have to go the restroom, I have to go to the restroom." And as we're driving
down, they said, "OK, but if you do anything,
anything funny at all, consider your sister dead." We pulled up to the gas station
and the driver said, "no, this doesn't look right.
I don't feel comfortable. This doesn't look right." So we continued down the
road to go to the next town, to the next gas station. As we were in-between
the two towns, a cop started coming
by us and passing us. The driver immediately began
to freak out, "there's a cop, there's a cop,
there's a cop, man." The one in the back said,
"calm down, cool off, man. It's just a cop. Relax" Continued to proceed,
the cop turns around-- I notice in the rearview
mirror-- turns around. "He's turning around,
he's turning around." And he's like, "what,
are you speeding? You idiot. What, are you speeding?" And he's going and the
cops start chasing him. As he starts chasing
him and moving quicker, another cop starts
proceeding towards us. At that point, both men
knew something's going on. He gunned it,
stepped on the pedal and started to go
very, very fast. They started to drive
extremely fast, and then at that point I ducked
and hid under my coat. I looked over at
the speedometer. We were going well
over 100 miles an hour on this little road and
blowing through this town. He's honking his horn as
fast as he can, flying, and there's cops
behind us with sirens. And we drive and we
eventually come to a turn. The roads are slick. It's winter time and he
slides and hits the side of this other gas station. Quickly, all the cops surround
the car and draw down on us. He reaches and grabs a gun
and goes, "get back, get back, and I'll shoot them. I got hostages. Get back." And so the cops, you know,
move their cars back, and he pulls back and
proceeds to go down this dugway, this ravine. And he was going way too
fast, loses control of the car and hits the side of
this dugway and the car pops up and slides down the
guardrail and goes backwards. And I remember
thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to go off a cliff. So the avalanche stops moving
and miraculously my head's sticking out of the snow. I yell for Kris and Brett. "Kris! Brett!" You know, just just yelling
for them, saying their names. "Are you guys OK?
We were just in an avalanche." You know, expecting those guys
to be able to talk, communicate a little bit. But there was nothing. There was none of that. They couldn't hear. They, they were buried. And then I began to worry. It got all three of us. I was not the only
one in this thing. We're in big trouble. That's the point at which I
start trying to get myself out of this thing. I start moving my shoulders
a little bit as best I could, and freeing up my arms. And as I free up my arms,
I can get my arms out and then I can pull
myself out of this snow. And it was, it was hard. It was, it was tough
to get out of there. I stand up and take a look
at this huge field of debris, and it's just, it
takes your breath away at how much damage and
destruction that this thing has, has done on the area, and
I happen to be alive through all of that. It, it takes a minute
for that to soak in. It's a pretty sickening
feeling when you first come out of the snow and realize your
two best friends are buried and they're relying on you-- it's all on you. The decisions I'm making
right now are life and death, and I'm going to have to
live with them for the rest of my life. I said, what have I done? But when you're on
the floor looking into a gun and a
crazy man, you know, you don't say a whole lot. You just, you just
kind of, I mean, you ask a question and if you
don't get an answer you don't insist, because you never
know what they're going to do. He finally pulls me to
my feet and he takes, he grabs me by the
arm and he takes me back to where he
had a backpack, back where all this had started. And he gets another gun
out of his backpack. I thought, oh my
gosh, two guns now. This is not good. My mother was yelling at
him to leave, to get out of the building and he said,
"say goodbye to your daughter." And he made her leave, made
her leave the building. All I knew is that I
wanted to keep peace. Here I was with a
man with two guns and, you know, what
else could I do? If I make him mad, if I yell
at him, if I try to run, then all I-- you know,
he's going to shoot me. It's very steep
and it's winter. The conditions aren't favorable. He loses control of the car and
hits the side of the railing. I remember thinking, oh my
gosh, we're wrecking this car. And then we went
back, at first we went like this and
all of a sudden it was like a ride
in a roller coaster-- went backward, and
that car was like this. I remember seeing
nothing but sky. In the moment that
the car was falling and I was crouched down, you
know, hiding for my life, I just remember feeling
scared and cold, and just can imagine that
we were going to roll and we were just waiting for any
moment to be dead in the car. As we were going
down, eventually it just seemed like forever
we were going down, and then boom, crash! Right after the car crash,
and there was a quick amount of silence just
for a few seconds, I heard the one man in
the gray sweatshirt turn around to the guy in
the back and say, "OK, this is our time to die now." It's almost like they had made
a pact that if they were going to get caught-- because they had
talked about they never wanted to go back
to prison again-- that they had made a pact that
they would end it in suicide. So the man driving turned
and pointed the gun to the man in the back seat, and
he immediately grabbed the gun out of his hand, physically,
and opened the door and started firing
at the police. Probably since the
avalanche hit us, maybe three minutes before I
was out, had my shovel out, and I didn't mess around. I got-- I knew what I had to do. As soon as that shovel hit
that snow and just kind of went tink, I knew I was in
trouble, because I wasn't-- I couldn't hardly
penetrate that snow. It was big of chunks of ice. This stuff's hard. So I dug around a little bit
there, tried to figure out what I was going to do. In 10 acres I had no
idea if I was-- you know, I could be two or three feet
off and miss them completely. I had to make a decision
then, and it was a tough one, because I knew these
guys were relying on me. I needed to take a look
around the debris field to see if there was any
indicator of them anywhere. The whole time I'm thinking,
am I wasting my time here? I should be digging
for one of these guys. You know, two or three or
four minutes under the snow, and are these guys
gonna, you know-- they're dying right now. I spent half an hour digging my
snowmobile out, turned it over, and started it right up. It was pretty banged up. After running around the debris
field looking for an indicator of where maybe Kris or Brett
are, I'm not finding anything. I don't see any gloves. I don't see anything,
anything that I was hoping to find sticking out to point
me in any sort of a direction as to where they might be. I looked back at
the debris field and told my friends that
I was sorry for not, not getting them out, not doing
what, what they needed me to do at that particular moment. They needed me to dig them
out and I couldn't do it. As I left, I told
them that I was sorry and that I'd get help. When we were in the room,
he sat there and told me story after story about things that
I had promised him, including giving him a son. I was going to leave my husband. He had in his mind that I
was going to totally change his life. And because I kept
refusing to do so, he had no choice but
to come and do me harm. I wasn't sure what
he was going to do. All I knew was I had two
guns pointing at my head the whole time while he was
telling me these stories. They were fantasies
of a crazy man. It was his reality, but
it wasn't my reality. My reality was that I was being
held hostage with two guns. The phone rings and
he let me pick it up, and on the other end was
the hostage negotiator. The negotiator wanted
to talk to Jociel, and he wouldn't talk with them. He would allow me to answer
the phone and talk with them, but he would not talk with them. And he wanted control
of how long I talked, and of course, what I said. All I can think of is my
kids at home, you know. And I just knew that I
needed to see them again. I needed, I needed
to stay alive. I can't, I can't let, let
this guy do anything to me. He's come into my
space and, you know, and he's trying to ruin my life. I haven't done anything to him. I gave him a job and I
haven't done anything. So all I can hang on
to is that, you know, I've got my kids at home and
I have to see them again. This had been going on for four
hours, being held at gunpoint, listening to stories, feeling
like I was part of a nightmare that just wouldn't end. And all of a sudden he says,
"I want you to take me out." I said, "you mean out the door?" And he said, "no, with a gun." I immediately reached back
and grabbed my sister's hand. I said, "duck,
duck, Linae," and we hold each other's hand
tight and both of us duck down as we're hearing
the one in the back shoot up, shoot, shoot, shoot,
shoot with the gun. We hear gunfire
come back, bullets are hitting the side of the car,
going into the leather seats behind us and just piercing it. The guy in the back
seat opens the door and uses the door as a shield. And so he's up pointing
above, firing at the police all up above. The next point, we hear
a shattering of the glass and then they ended up
running out of bullets. I remember them saying, "crap,
we're out of it, ammunition, the guns are empty." I'd been ducking down and
looking up and then seeing a man come to me at gunpoint. And I remember saying, "no!" I thought for an instant
that I was going to be shot. It seemed like it
was just minutes that they realized, oh goodness,
you know, these are the girls. I just remember walking by
saying, "these men just killed my family. They murdered my mom
and grams and my dad. Shoot them." I remember saying,
"just shoot them now." I was screaming it. It's almost like at that point
is when my voice came back. I was out of that state
of shock and I realized what had actually gone on. These men are in handcuffs and
I was hopeful that the policeman would kill them. It seemed quite
out of my character to be able to wish death
on another human being. I think it was just the
initial normal human reaction to if you've just watched your
mother murdered, your gram's head blown off, and then
your father killed right before your eyes, and
that's what I understood. In the hallway my
uncle was standing, and I embraced him
in a great big hug. And he just said to me,
"sweetie, your dad's alive." And I just remember feeling so
happy and ecstatic that my dad was still alive. It's a 10 mile trek back out
of here with a banged up leg and a big snowmobile
and a lot of deep snow. This is going to
be a lot of work. On my way out, my
mindset was rescue, and that's how I had to do it. The whole day I kept my mind
frame that these guys are OK, they're just
unresponsive right now. I knew that I had a
really tough incline to get to the top of before
I could start my descent down to the truck. And I knew that if I got
stuck, I was by myself, and it was a big deal to
get these things unstuck by yourself. I got stuck on the incline
coming back out uphill, only probably a quarter of a mile
from the avalanche field. And that was a tough thing
to deal with, mentally. I was in this urgent state
and my snowmobile's stuck. I can't get out and I got to
spend all this time digging this thing out. So I got my snowmobile out
and I did not mess around. I didn't care what I hit. I didn't care if
I ran over rocks. I didn't care if
I ran over trees. I didn't-- all that went out. I was not getting stuck again. I could not get stuck again. And it was just-- it was
full throttle to the top of the hill. Now that I'm to the top, I
can make it back out of here. I get to the bottom of the
hill, start out down the road, and my snowmobile dies. It's dead. It's done. And now I have to walk
out with a banged up leg. I know that I'm a long ways
away from the truck still, and my leg and ankle
now are really hurting. I walk the two miles, and as I
finally get to the parking lot I realize there are a
couple of families there. I hobble up, my snowmobile
pants are shredded, I'm dragging my leg,
my helmet is gone. I probably look like I'm
in pretty rough shape. And they come over to me,
I talk to them about what just happened, and we call-- I use their phone to call 9-1-1. He says, "you have
damaged me to this point, you may as well finish me off." I said, "I can't do that." I mean, I can't, I
can't kill anybody. I can't-- I've never held a gun. No. No. I said, "you just go out there,
they'll take care of you." And he says, "No. You are going to do this to me." He would have me stand up,
he put the gun in my hand, he'd wrap his hand
around my hand and then hold it to his head. And then I'd say, "no,
no, I can't do it. I can't do it." We went through this whole
scenario a couple of more times and I kept saying,
"no, I can't do it. I can't do it. I cannot pull a trigger." And he said-- and he made
it more and more obvious that if I don't then he
was going to kill us both. He knelt down on the floor
and I stood next to him, facing away from him. I, I didn't want to see. He put the gun in my hand and
wrapped his hand around mine and put it to his head. I, I don't know, I don't
know what happened, but the trigger was pulled. I heard the gun go off
and I dropped it and ran. I never saw what
happened after that. I ran through the
building, waving my arms so that the SWAT
team that was outside would know that that it was me. The SWAT team went in and
found him dead on the floor. I survived because I needed
to get home to my kids. I needed to still
be their mother. And I also survived because I
was able to stay calm and not make him any madder than
what he already was, and I did what I had to do
to get out of the situation. I had hopes all the way
through the night that they were still alive, that they
were just knocked unconscious, that they couldn't respond. Finally they came in and said
that they found one of them. And of course my
family was there, and they didn't-- they
told my family first, and my family didn't
want to tell me. But I knew. As soon as they
told my family, I could tell that they found
Brett, that he was gone. They found Brett between
where I came out of the snow and where my
snowmobile was, so that means I walked over the
top of him numerous times. I had no way to know. And Kris was so far
away from anything that I would've never found him. I survived because I wouldn't
give up on my friends. I had a tremendous hope that
my friends were still alive and that the rescuers
would be able to save them. Randy shows up and tells us
that my dad was still alive and we think he's
going to pull through. Just wow, I'm the
luckiest girl in the world to still have a dad. My daddy was still there. He had gotten
up and went inside to find my mother
and grandmother. Well, these two men had
caught the cabin on fire. So immediately my
father caught on fire and he ran to the shower
and tore off his snow suit and tried to get the
fire off, and so he was left with jeans and a t-shirt. He jumped on the one snowmobile
that was there and went as fast as he could down that canyon. I remember my dad telling
me all that was on my mind is I have to get my girls. I have to get my girls. We weren't able to see our
dad until the following day. Had bandages all around his
head, but just such a sigh relief that I could-- knew it was my dad. I saw these beautiful blue
eyes and instantly just a huge sense of relief. Running and embracing him and
him just hugging and saying "it's all going to be OK." I survived because
I have a purpose. I have a lot to give
and a lot to share. I survived to be able to share
a relationship with my sister. We survived because
our instinct told us to. An instinct to survive
simply kicked in as soon as those guys
shot my dad and Linae and I ran to each other, an
instinct to survive kicked in. There was no reason why a
beautiful life here or there's simply an instinct
to survive, and we're going to do whatever
it took to survive. I just knew that that
wasn't any other option. Survivors is who we are. Survivors is who we are today. Survivors are who we
choose to continue to be.
