I'll play dead. If I play dead, he
wouldn't shoot me again. You don't have
the right gear on. You don't have a cell
phone that'll work. You don't have any
of these things that you need to survive. What are you going to do? My life no longer
belonged to me. Now, someone else owned it. Someone else could choose
whether to keep it or throw it away. I was going to live. I did not want them
planning a funeral. I met Michael 20 years ago. We were both in
the same business. I owned a stained
glass business. And he sold me glass. And I got a phone
call, and it was him. And we reacquainted
ourselves with each other. We had been friends. It was good to hear from him. I was feeling lonely. And it comforted me to
know that I had this friend and that it might be possible
that we could see each other. I think his interests were
romantic he was clearly wooing me. And we decided that it would
be OK if he came to Portland and that he could park his
motor home in my driveway. He seemed successful. And he had that
air about him, too. That confidence. So I believed it. On my way home from work, I had
stopped to see my loan officer. And we talked and had a great
conversation about how we could get a little extra money and
take care of a few things. And he pulled up
my credit report. And he looked at my credit
report and he says, oh, my. What is this? And there were a list
of 14 credit cards that I knew nothing about and
$30,000 on these credit cards. My head is whirling. I'm shocked. I'm thinking, this-- wow. But for some reason, I
immediately thought, Michael. And he said, oh, no, no, no. We talked about it. These are credit cards
that you applied for. And so he was
talking about these as if we had an
arrangement about them. And we hadn't. And he got up, and he
went out the front door, and he was in his motor home for
probably, oh, 10 minutes or so. 10, 15 minutes. He paused at the steps and
then came in the front, and I thought we were going
to resume the conversation. He walked over to me, and I
was expecting him to sit down. But he actually reached
over to my neck. He put pressure on my neck,
and I was noticing that I was starting to pass out. His demeanor was cold. I think at that point,
I thought, oh, this is a monster I'm looking at. While I was sitting
at the truck actually getting ready to
go up on a sleds, I thought to myself,
you know what? It's warm. I'm already sweating before
I even put my coat on, and I'm going to be
up there sledding all day with this coat. And then probably what I'll
do is eventually leave it somewhere. And I may misplace it. Something may happen to it. So you know what? I'm not going to get
stuck or anything, so I'll just leave
everything here. We actually went up
Cottonwood Canyon, and there was a lake bed. And most of the time,
it's frozen over. And we actually
crossed the lake bed and got to play a little bit
on the snow and a little bit on the ice before we
went up the chute. And I looked around,
and in the process of climbing the mountain,
you put stress on your belts and on the snowmobile. And actually, what I did what
was called burning a belt. My belt actually
had been destroyed. And so what I did was
actually pulled the belt off, and I actually placed it. And in this process-- it
was about 10 or 15 minutes, and I didn't see Trent
anywhere to be seen. So at that point, I'm kind of
wondering, where's Trent at? Instead of preparing myself
for what could happen, I thought about what was
going to happen in my mind, and that was a
mistake on my part. Because it's not a matter
of if you get stuck. It's a matter of
when you get stuck. I was out having a
regular night in Manhattan and on my way home
on the subway. And I actually started
talking to this girl, and she was lovely. And we both got off
at the same stop. And after we left,
I said, do you mind? Just wait a moment
while I go in this deli to try to get my favorite
chocolate chip cookies. And she didn't mind. But they didn't have them. So she says, well, come walk
over towards where I live. Maybe they have them there. So we walk further
towards very close to where she lives and
found an open supermarket, where we bought-- I bought the cookies for myself. She preferred a
different brand, so she got her own bag of cookies. And then I walked
her to her building. Said good night. She went up the stairs. And I was feeling great. Had a perfectly nice
night out in Manhattan. And then I walked down the
street towards Fifth Avenue. And as I approached the corner,
I felt the tug on my elbow from behind, and an
automatic machine gun was sticking in my gut. Two guys were behind me. Move, move, they screamed. They shoved me into the
street where there was a brand new black Lexus waiting. And they pushed me
there and put me into the back seat
of the car, where there was a third man sitting
in the front passenger seat. And he put a pistol in my
face when I got in the car. Absolutely absurd feeling. The thought that I
was just walking home, and suddenly, I'm a
prisoner in a car. I can see outside to what are
the normal streets that I'm used to and feel comfortable in
with three men who have guns, and apparently have no-- would have no hesitation
in using them. And suddenly, I'm trapped. The next thing I knew
was I was waking up, and I was on the floor. And he was standing there. And he said to me, you
must not be feeling well. And I'm thinking,
not feeling well? You just-- you pinched my neck. You caused me to black out. And so I remember rising up
and kind of steadying myself on the couch and moving myself
towards the back of the house. But he wouldn't let me go. And I see the gun
raise up to my head, and I hear a shot being fired. And it was just this
enormously loud noise. And I heard a
second shot go off. Didn't feel it,
but had heard it. At this point, my head
is just-- it's ringing. I can't feel anything. I have no sensation. But it seems that my brain is
still working, functioning. The first thing that I had to
figure out was, was I alive? And I wasn't sure
that I was alive because I knew that the
gun was aimed at my head. I knew that I had been injured. And my thought was that
somebody gets shot in the head, and you're dead. There's just no way around it. You die. I was looking out into the
space of my living room. Was the white light there? I also thought that maybe
I would see my father, who had died the year earlier, and
that he would be there with me. But I didn't see him. So I'm beginning to
conclude that I am alive. So I remember-- that must
have very quickly gone through my mind and had
decided that I'll play dead. If I play dead, he
wouldn't shoot me again. I do have a chance. I could survive this. He's going to make a mistake. I'll be able to jump
in in whatever manner. You know, I was putting
scenarios together where I could, you
know-- some way that I could get out of this. So I was ready. I don't think-- I couldn't tell
how wounded I was. I was afraid to test that. I knew that I
couldn't fight him. I knew he would just kill me. I was laying sideways
on the couch. So when I opened my eyes, I
could see a sideways slit. I could see him walking
through the living room. He actually picked up a
pillow off of the couch and put it over my head
and fired two more times. Not seeing Trent there, I
started thinking, well, maybe he's stuck somewhere. Maybe I need to go help him. But the snow was so nice
that when I went out to look for him, I
was just enjoying it. I went back over
to Wagner Mountain. Couldn't see him there. So I went back over,
and I couldn't find him. And in the process, I started
getting a little bit nervous. I realized that down in
these gullies and kind of in the crevices, you can't
get a cell phone signal. The only place I
could get a signal was back up on
top of a mountain. And so at this time, knowing
that I couldn't see him, that I didn't have any
knowledge where he was at, I had to go out there
and start my snowmobile and start back up the hill. But as I actually stood
off my snowmobile, I sunk up past my
hips in the snow. And as I kind of struggled to
get back on top my snowmobile, I'm like, wow. This is some deep snow. You know, it's cool,
but it's dangerous because I'm down now probably
about 1,000 feet from top of the mountain,
and it's all power. And at this point,
I'm like, I don't know if I have enough power on
my snowmobile to get me out. And it got slower and slower
and steeper and steeper. As I got down in
there, I realized that it was kind of the
start of the Salt River that runs through the
valley then up front. And so I knew that
there was going to be some water at some point. As I got to the flat
area, I realized that there was open water. And at this point, I
decided to try to gun it, go across the water before
the snowmobile actually sunk in the water. As a gunned it, I
hit the throttle, and I hit the accelerator. And the snowmobile
started going across, and it sunk into the water. As it sunk in the water, I
jumped off my snowmobile, and I watched it sit there and
kind of sink in about three to four feet of water. And I was standing on the side. And I'm like, OK. I'm dry. Snowmobile's wet. Now what? Well, as I was standing
there waiting to be rescued and waiting to figure out
what I should do, either get in the water or wait, I
thought, you know what? I just won the
world championships. I can do anything. I don't need to be rescued. I could do it myself. And I chose to get in the water. As I picked it
up, I got it here. Now what? And you physically cannot push
the 600-pound snowmobile with this type of strength. You have to make the track go. You have to slide the skis and
the undercarriage of the belly of the snowmobile through the
snow till it actually moves. And then I had to keep it
up and then actually push the 600-pound snowball
out of the water as I was submerge to my mid
thigh and up to my shoulders in ice cold water. I knew I had to get out of
there, and I had to do it now. Sitting directly
in front of me was what immediately emerged
as the leader of the gang. And he began to
announce their plan. First of all, he told
his main henchman sitting to his right
to get my wallet. And then he demanded my
pin number for my ATM card. And when they heard that
that amount of money was sitting in my savings,
they practically bugged out. I mean, their
first reaction was, what do you do for
a living, Stanley? And sheepishly I said, well,
you really kind of picked up the wrong guy, because I'm
an assistant US attorney. And they asked me how old I am. 38. You got a wife? No. You got kids? No. You got a girlfriend? No. And one of them said, Stanley,
what have you been doing, man? You're 38 years old. You've got no wife. You've got no kids. What the heck's going on? To which I just
naturally responded, you should ask my parents. They've been wondering
the same thing. And right in the middle
of the kidnapping, my kidnappers actually laughed. When I first arrived,
a couple of times, they called me Stephen. I had the feeling that
if I wanted to survive, one thing that ought
to be kept straight was my name, because
my name is my identity, and that was important. So I kept saying, my
name isn't Steven. It's Stanley. And they laughed.
They thought that was funny. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Steven is the guy we did
this to the other night. There was $1,000 limit on
cash machine withdrawals every 24 hours. So they were a bit stymied. And they explained to me that
their plan was now to keep me. That they were going to
take me to an apartment and hold me overnight. In the morning, they
would take me to the bank, and I would withdraw $50,000. If I failed to cooperate,
they would kill me. They also said that they would
kill my father if I didn't cooperate. And unfortunately,
his business card which had his home address
on it was in my wallet. They said they would break
every bone in his body. This was perhaps the worst
moment of the entire thing because you can kill me. You can hurt me. You can do whatever
you want to me. But don't do something
to someone that I love. And my head was just
this tremendous amount of noise ringing in my ears. It felt like something just
was enveloping my head. I didn't notice any pain. There wasn't any pain. Every once in a while, he
would come over to the couch and lift up the
pillow and look at me. And I could sense that enough,
I think, that I was able to-- my eyes were shut. I knew he was doing it. I especially held my breath. I am about 15 feet
from the front door. I would have to go through the
living room and the hallway to get to the front door. But I was afraid that I
wouldn't be able to do that. And I knew he always
carried a pocket knife. I was afraid he was going
to use that on me next. He sat down at the desk. He had the computer on. He was playing a
game at the computer. The TV was on, and it
seemed pretty loud to me. I had to concentrate so
carefully on what was going on. And I could tell that it
was getting a little later. If it got dark, my
chances were diminishing. I really thought, I could die. I could die here. This was a long time
that I was laying there, so there were a lot of
things going through my head. Not only how was I going to
get out of this, but my family and my friends. And they actually visited me. I had very vivid images of them
as one by one, they came to me, and I could talk with them. And somehow, I knew my
father was with me, too. I felt comforted by that. That I didn't see him,
but he was there with me. My mom came to me. I promised her that there would
not be a funeral that she would have to go to. It was just the year before that
we had a funeral for my father, and I didn't want
her to do that. I was going to live. I did not want them
planning a funeral. I think I noticed that
he gets up from the desk and walks over to
the front door. At this point, I'm
thinking about the phone. Where's the phone? And I'm praying that it's there,
because it's a cordless phone. It could be anywhere
in the house. It's very often
anywhere in the house. But I reach for it, and
it's there, miraculously. I dial 911. Reach the dispatch. And I said, I remember
saying just very quickly. I've been shot. I'm at my address. You know, I gave
my address to her. And I hung up. I disconnected. With a hang up call,
911 has to call back. So the phone is ringing. And he is walking
in the front door. At this point, I have to push
and also accelerate the snow to hopefully get the
track to get some traction and actually get it
back moving and get it on top of the ice or the
snow, whatever was there. And as soon as I started
moving the snowmobile forward, it went out pretty effortless
after I'd done all the work to pick it up and get it on
that straight and level path. Well, as I crawled out of the
water, I got up to the edge. I'm like, OK. Well, now what? And now, I know I
was in a time crunch and I had to save myself. And I got on my snowmobile, and
I accelerated it and did almost the exact same thing. But right in the middle,
my snowball kind of bogged and it went right
back in the water. I was so frustrated that I
actually jumped off right into the water. I was upset, and I let
emotion actually drive me. And now, I actually picked
up the snowmobile again, and I pulled it,
I accelerated it, and I got it out of there
probably within a matter of a minute or two minutes
because I was now angry that this had happened twice,
and my snowmobile wasn't able to perform and
that I let this happen. You know, some people say
I would've died out there. I wouldn't have been
able to pick that up. Death is a great motivator. Death will motivate you to
do the things that you never thought you could possibly do. But that day, I
didn't have a choice. I was following the river
back to Star Valley. I would actually have a
chance to sit back and, OK. No lights. I can't see anybody. I don't know where
my friends are at. I don't know where
Trent ever went. And I hope they know I'm lost. And so I hope they actually
have started looking for me. I hope that a car actually
started to come up here and track me down. Because by the time
they got to me, I was going to be in
severe hypothermia and possibly have
severe frostbite. And as I came through, I got to
a point after about 100 yards where my snowmobile got stuck
between two big boulders. As I got stuck, I crawled
over the boulders, and I got in front
of my snowmobile. I was very close to
getting it through. And as I got on
the front of them, I started pulling my
snowmobile backwards. And as I started pulling
it, my hand slipped. As my hands slipped, I fell
into the river on my back. I was in panic mode, and
I'm like, I gotta get over. I got to turn over. And I turned over,
and I stood up. So what I'd done is I
actually turned my body and completely made
everything wet now. And this was about 7:30 at
night when I actually got wet. And I stood up. And I said, OK. What are you going to do? And that's when I
realized, you know what? You don't have
the right gear on. You don't have a fire starter. You don't have a cell
phone that'll work. You don't have any
of these things that you need to survive. What are you going to do? So the leader of the
gang instructed the guy sitting next to me to use
my scarf as a blindfold. They shoved me down in
the seat next to him so that I was lying sort of
in a fetal position sideways and with my head pressing
up against his leg. I mean, it was bizarrely
intimate and obviously just frightening as could be,
although, to some extent, your body goes
into survival mode. And sort of your adrenaline and
your instinct to try to survive take over. But the entire experience
was absolutely petrifying. My life, which had belonged to
me just a few minutes earlier, no longer belong to me. Now, someone else owned it. Someone else could choose
whether to keep it or throw it away. That was an absolutely
unbearable feeling. You can hear them cocking
and uncocking the guns in order to intimidate me. One of the guys says,
have you ever seen one of these things, Stanley? All you gotta do is
squeeze this trigger. It'll give off 10 shots. And bam, bam, bam, Your brains
will be all over that wall. And there were
mattresses on the floor, and they shoved me down
on one of the mattresses. So the girls show up, and
they walk into the apartment, and they're shocked. What are you guys doing here? What have you dragged home? And the boys are
like, oh, don't worry. We're just using this
to get some money. You don't have to worry
yourselves about it. So they also smoke
marijuana, and then they had sex with the girls. It was a godsend at that
point that I was blindfolded, but I could hear sexual acts
going on around me in the room. And they started
asking me questions. Stanley, what would you be doing
right now if we hadn't grabbed you on the street? And I said, actually,
later on today, my friends would be meeting
me because it's my birthday. And they thought that was the
funniest thing they'd ever heard.
Oh, my God. We kidnapped a guy
on his birthday. They thought that
was hysterical. And then they said, oh, well. It's your birthday. You deserve something
nice for your birthday. You know, that may sound
funny, but at the time, it wasn't funny in the least. I could not afford under
those circumstances being held at gunpoint where my
life was right on the line-- I could cannot afford to be
violated in that fashion. So what I did was I just sort
of tried to smoothly sidestep it and say, well, you know, I'm
sure the girls are lovely. But given my circumstances,
I'd really rather not. Even though I'm being
terrorized at gunpoint, there was the feeling that I
was remaining calm and polite. And my thought was
that if I took it, I would be just another John. And that it's a lot easier
psychologically to kill a guy who's just another John
than somebody who says no. He was talking to the
dispatch operator. I couldn't tell
what he was saying or what they were saying. Maybe I was-- I was
disconnecting from that. That had nothing to do with me. I had to really concentrate
on staying alive. I could see him passing in front
of me with the gun in his hand. I was getting tired. I was worried that I
would lose consciousness. I was worried that I would die. And it seemed like the
conversation on the phone was going on and
on, and on, and on. And what is this? Like whoa, wait a minute. Where are the police? They should be
coming in right now. They should be
breaking the windows. They should be doing something. They should be shooting
this guy, wrestling him to the ground. I was really-- and I just wasn't
sure how long I could hang on. There were a few moments, I do
remember, when he would kind of hold out the phone
and say, Lonnie, they want to talk to you. And I wasn't going
to fall for that. I did not want to give
him any indication that I was alive or
alert or anything. It was-- that just
seemed so important to me that I stay as silent and
calm and unmoving as possible. I had been there for
four hours, bleeding, and I wanted to stay alive. And I had to keep talking
to myself in order for me to believe that that
was going to happen. There was also a discussion
between the thugs that had grabbed me on the street
about this plan of theirs. They were going to take me
to the bank and the morning and withdraw $50,000 at gunpoint
and kill me and kill my father if I didn't do it. And they were getting cold feet. They said, look.
This isn't really going to work. It's not going to look right. You can't just pull
up to a bank like that and take out a huge sum of cash. It's not going to work. In the midst of that
conversation, he pops-- the leader pops his
head back in to the room and he says, what did you say
you do for a living again, Stanley? And I said, I'm an
assistant US attorney. And he said, oh, no. US? The FBI is going to be after us. So then they finish
their conversation, and they come back in. And the leader tells
me, Stanley, we've changed the plan. I'm going to come back
again later on this morning, and I'm going to take you back. And then he left. So now, we go into round
two of smoking marijuana and sexual acts with the girls. And this was really the
point at which they really started playing with
me in a humorous way. You know, they said,
well, you know, Stanley, it's a shame we had to meet
under these circumstances. We could have been friends. And I just smiled. And then they said, actually,
you should join our gang. They said I could
make more money being part of
their criminal gang than I was making as a lawyer. But no matter how much
joking, bonding went on, I knew that people who
were like this, people who are willing to grab
a guy off the street-- for them to pull the
trigger, it's not a big leap. There's a perversity, I think,
to the spirit that would allow someone who's joking with you
one minute to pull the trigger in your face the next minute. So I never really felt relief. I'm fighting for my
life at this point. I'm trying to stay conscious. Michael's on the phone,
and he's calm enough. It doesn't seem that
he's very upset. And it's like he's trying
to charm them, too. I knew that the
police were outside because through
the front window, there was a bright light
that was coming through. I was getting frustrated. It was just taking too long. And I was debating-- you know, I had a little
conversation in my head going, another conversation. You know, should
I say something? Can I say something to him? Would he attacked me if
I said something to him? I do remember halfway
sitting up and saying to him, I'm not going to make it. You need to let them
come in and get me. I must have noticed a pause. And then he continued
his conversation. It was like, I had
never even said it. That it didn't even matter. But he must have been making a
decision about giving himself up. He was saying something like,
I'm going to take my shirt off. I'm putting my gun down. I'm going to walk
out the front door. And I'm not sure that I actually
saw him walk out the door, but I sensed that he did
go out the front door. It's this person totally
dressed in black. Goggles. Big machine gun kind
of looking thing. And I knew it was the police. And it was just, thank, God. And I locked eyes with this man. And (TEARING UP) you
know, this was, I'm saved. I'm saved. You know, I think back, and
he was my angel in black. It was the first person
that I could see and know that I was safe at that point. So it was it was the most
amazing thing that I thought I was going to die. And him walking in was just
this thing from heaven. I knew I had to walk
to find some trees. And I knew I needed to head
westbound and follow the river. And as I started walking,
I made it probably about 20 to 30 yards. And I found an area
there wasn't snow. And not having snow, I
thought, you know what? Just lay down. You need to conserve some heat. You need to try to create
some heat because you've been pushing yourself. As I laid down there, I
went to the fetal position. I remember sitting
there shivering my body, and just thinking,
you're so cold. You're in so bad of trouble. And you don't have
any plan here. What are you doing? What I thought about
was the Olympic finals. Was winning the
world championships. That I was the best. It was such a positive,
uplifting moment. Such a good thought. And I want to come
back, and I want to go back and wrestle in 2002. I want to wrestle in 2003, 2004. And I want to make
the team, and I want to win another
Olympic gold medal. I want to be the best again. If I could see
the sun come up, I would make it because I
knew that they would find me before sunrise because I knew
they were looking for me. I knew that they would be close. I remember sitting back
and kind of watching all the stars disappear. One by one, they were leaving. And I thought to
myself, you know what? You're probably going to die. This is probably the last
few minutes of your lifetime. You did your best. You accomplished your goal, and
that was to make it to morning. And about, you know, when I
was thinking that process, within a few minutes,
I heard an airplane. And as it came up there,
he saw me the first time. As I saw him, I kind
of waved at him, like, hey, it's the airplane. He signaled by kind of tilting
his wings to say he saw me. And he turned around,
and he went out, and he called search and rescue. But when I got to the
hospital and we went in there, I started laughing. And my friend said,
why are you laughing? I said, because I made it. I did it. And another person who
hasn't been through something like that-- they can't understand. You know, it's a
whole 'nother world. The new plan is to hold me
until midnight so that they can get one last hit on
my cash machine card. He says he's going to take the
girls back out on the street, and then he'll come
back and let me go. And he starts to leave. But as he's on his way out,
you can hear his feet stop. And he turns around. And he says, Stanley, let
me ask you a question. If you had the chance to put me
away for life, would you do it? So I said, look. You've already told me
you know where I live. You've told me you know
where my father lives. I don't know who you are. I don't know where we are. You haven't hurt
me so far, and you say you're going to
release me unharmed. I don't think this
has to go any further. And he said, well, OK. And he stormed out
with the girls. I hear the sound of duct tape
being pulled off of a role, and that was the most
frightening moment of my entire life and of this
incident because I was positive that they were going to tape
my mouth shut, take me outside, and murder me. But I was mistaken. Someone had broken
into the car overnight and smashed the glass. Well, the glass
hadn't been fixed yet. It was covered with plastic,
and it was flapping and making noise in the wind. So all he was doing
was using the duct tape to fix the plastic. Then he opens the door. He tells me to get
out beside him. They say, put your hands
up in the air and walk. I thought I could hear the
gentle sound of the Lexus pulling away, but I had
never heard the door shut. So I thought it was very
possible that the guy was still behind me with the gun. So finally, with my hands
raised, I said, are you there? And I didn't hear any answer. So I ripped the blindfold off. I spun around. And they were gone. And that was the happiest
moment of my entire life. The doctor when I
arrived there said, your feet are frozen solid. You'll probably never walk. You'll probably lose them at
the ankle within the week. You need to think about the rest
of your life, your wrestling future. Your wrestling career is over,
and you need to think about it. But within eight months
of training hard every day and working hard every day, I
came back to beat the reigning world champion to make the
2003 and the 2004 Olympic team, where I eventually won a
2004 Olympic bronze medal. People who've been beaten
down their whole lives, they understand anger, but
they can't deal with kindness. When given the chance,
I humanized myself. And I showed them great respect. An assistant US attorney is
trained to gather evidence and link the evidence together. So the whole time I sat
there, I was gathering clues. And skilled investigators can
use those clues to find people. And that's exactly
what happened. At the end of the day, they
didn't feel like killing me. You know, there's all these
little miracles that happened through this whole thing. Any one of those shots
could have killed me. The fourth bullet missed me. It ended up in the
wall of my living room. I think that it was a
miracle that I survived. I could have died where that
just would have been it. And I knew that
was a possibility. But my will to
live was so strong. And my friends, my family,
were so important to me that I didn't want
to let that go.
