Very seldom there is a testimony with a good outcome. This is one of them. All rights go to the author.
I escaped being gooned. This is how I did it
This is the full story of my experience. I’ll create a separate post for advice since this one is already really long.
Some info on me: I am female but I identify as a transman now and go by he/him. I was not out as trans to anyone when I was sent off. At the time I was 17 years old 5’7 and 135 lbs but I’ve always been quite strong even without exercise. I was sent away because my father was cheating on my mother and I confronted him and told her about it. He didn’t like that so he made up some bs about me being a terrible child and sent me away as revenge. He even manipulated my mother into helping him. I live in the southeastern US and I was supposed to be taken to Open Sky in Colorado by Right Direction Crisis Intervention.
I have problems sleeping so I was awake and just about to go to bed when they knocked on my door at 5:00 am. My parents were standing there along with a man and a woman. Their names were Demetrius and Sharlene. I’ll refer to them as D and S. If anyone else has had experiences with either of them please let me know in the comments. I’m curious to know how it went.
I was somewhat nervous so I wore my hiking clothes but I didn’t fight back yet. I just went along with it and got in the car with two strangers. In the back of the car I didn’t speak much, I just started planning and braided my hair up tightly so it would be out of the way.
I had already decided to stop eating and drinking by the time we got to the airport. I wanted to make sure I had a way to escape in case I was going someplace truly terrible, even if that meant dying.
D was just annoying at the Airport and joked about me getting raped while S acted like a straight-up nonce. She kept commenting on my appearance and how good I looked. And when whenever I had to use the bathroom she’d insist on staring at me until I demanded she turn around. I tried my best to ignore them both.
The flight was awful. I think it was caused by me being sleep-deprived, but I had an extremely painful headache on the flight. I was both exhausted and in pain which made me pissed off. I decided I’m not going along with this anymore. When we landed in Dallas TX and got off the plane I sat down at one of the seats at the terminal and refused to move. D and S both berated me for a while and asked the plane to wait, but I shouted for them to just leave because I wasn’t coming, so they did. S then went and rented a car. I still wouldn’t get in it so they called the cops for assistance. The police tried to convince me to get in the car but I told them politely that I’m not going. They started surrounding me. I was falling asleep because I was so exhausted, but I was suddenly awoken by D and the cops all grabbing my limbs and running off with me.
I flipped the fuck out. I was terrified. I figured that if they were so desperate to get me to this place but wouldn’t tell me what it was then I must be going somewhere truly awful. I assumed that my parents had sold to a cartel for trafficking and I knew I’d rather die than experience that.
I slammed the cops around while they were carrying me. There was one cop was holding each of my legs so I kept slamming them into each other trying to knock them over. But they still managed to get me to the car where they struggled for about 15 minutes to even get me in the door. There were six cops plus D, so I was fighting seven large men at once. I had so much adrenaline going that I was extremely strong and everything was going in slow motion. At one point I remember looking over and seeing this super buff cop holding into my forearm and somehow I was able to pull it back from him fairly easily.
I would have preferred jail, hospital, or death to what I thought was human trafficking so I kept kicking the cop that looked most annoyed in hopes that he’d either shoot me or arrest me but he wouldn’t.
They eventually got me in the car. D soon joined me in the back while S drove. I obviously was in a lot of pain so I requested D take me to the hospital. He refused. I requested he let me talk to my parents. He refused. I asked to talk to police again. He refused. I informed him that regardless of whether he currently had custody over me, it was still illegal to deny me medical treatment. He chose to ignore it but said I was a good debater…
I was even more scared at this point. I started banging on the window trying to attract attention. D told me if I banged on the window one more time he’d kill me. I absolutely could not resist and I banged on the window one last time…so he slammed my head into the door and started strangling me. He stopped eventually but only after my vision had started turning black and I’d gotten a large cut above my eye.
I never actually attacked him. I continuously tried to escape and defended myself when he attacked me for it. It wasn’t at all a fair fight. I was hungry, thirsty, sleep-deprived, and injured from the struggle with the cops. He tried to rip my hair out but the braid I’d done prevented it from even hurting. He also went for my throat again but I’d learned to keep my chin down. I managed to get a good bite on his forearm and sank my teeth into the skin until he ripped his arm away.
At some point, I determined that I was more likely to survive a car crash than a fight with this man so I tried to grab the wheel. D pulled me back and threw me on the floor. I was on my back with my knees forced up to my chest. He sat on top of me and pushed down. So the weight of my legs, his entire body weight, and the force of him pushing down were all on my chest. I couldn’t inhale fully and started to suffocate and eventually passed out. When I regained consciousness he had gotten off me but was laughing and pointing out to S that I was ‘’playing dead’’.
As I was starting to get weaker and closer to death I’d stop trying to brute force the escape and asked to stop and go to the bathroom. We stopped at a gas station where I didn’t try to directly call for help because no one was really close by, but I did fake faint right on the gas station floor. D scared away anyone who tried to help and demanded no one call an ambulance. He and S literally dragged my limp body back to the car and for some reason, absolutely no one thought that was suspicious enough to call the police.
D put me back on the floor of the car but a few minutes later started to act strangely nice again and told me I could sit on the seat. I tried to sit up but realized my neck muscles were so broken I couldn’t lift my head to sit up. My entire body felt broken and useless. It was at that point I realized brute-forcing my way out of this wasn’t going to work.
So I talked. I asked D many questions. We talked about religion and death. He told me all about how evolution wasn’t real and talked about god. I told him he’d already lost because I’d be dead soon and that I was not afraid. Take my body but you can’t take me alive.
I asked him about his childhood and family life. He said he had children my age. He also said he’d done bad things when he was younger and that he used to beat women. When I asked about his childhood he literally started crying and said he wished he’d had more time with his parents. So I asked if they were dead. He looked at me dead serious and said “No.” I was absolutely bewildered by how stupid of a person I was interacting with. If your parents are still alive just go visit them…
About an hour after the first rest stop I asked to use the bathroom again. At this rest stop, I was determined to ask for help. After I got inside I collapsed on the floor against one of the walls and refused to move. A few people came inside and I begged them to call the cops. All of them including an army soldier ignored me. D wasn’t able to just grab me and put me back in the car because we were in public. Infection and likely sepsis from my bite on his arm had turned the whole thing red and puffy. He noticed it but was too dumb to realize what was wrong with him. D didn't know what to do so he called his manager and asked her. I yelled at them that I wanted to talk to police. She said in a cocky tone that he could call the police because they’d just put me back in the car. So D called the police.
And unsurprisingly they didn’t put me back in the car, they called an ambulance because I was dying. D and S followed the ambulance until we got to the hospital. They tried to come get me but were kicked out by cops and told their papers weren’t valid there (this was still in Texas). I was treated at the hospital and then taken by CPS who screamed at my parents for doing this to me. My mom was forced to drive all the way over to come get me and I was allowed to go back home.
Back at home, I was starting to fully feel my injuries. Every muscle in my body was wrecked. It was so painful. I bent down to pick up my cat one time and just collapsed on the floor and had to drag myself upstairs. It took almost a month to fully recover. Even after I was physically recovered I was still in shock for a few weeks after. I was scared they’d come back to kill me. So I had a manic episode in which I completed the last goal I had on my list which was creating an animation. I worked on it for days straight until I would collapse from exhaustion. I barely ate anything. I was so happy when I finished it so that I could be at peace when they came back to kill me.
But they never did. (I asked my parents and they told me I was kicked out from Open Sky and banned from Right Direction.) After that the happiness and mania quickly faded because now I would have to live with the trauma. Since then my anxiety and depression has gotten much worse and I developed an eating disorder and PTSD. I had one PTSD episode where a man told to move to a different seat at an event and I got triggered and came so close to trying to kill a man over a stupid chair.
When I point out to my parents that most of my mental health problems from this even. They tell me to get over it because it wasn’t that bad… my relationship with them was pretty much ruined by this.
But despite the trauma it’s caused me I have no regrets and I fully believe I would have been more traumatized had I actually gotten to Open Sky and been trapped there for months.
Thank you for reading. I know this post was really long. I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments.
Source:
The original testimony on Reddit
