Day 7 & 8 - Escape Concepts

AI generated podcast transcript:

All right, so this will be days seven and eight, most likely assuming that we get this put out today.

So I mentioned in the prologue that my wife and I were doing this a week in advance, and we kind of started out that way.

And then I moved the days forward a couple of days, and long story short, we're behind.

And so we're actually doing this in real time, real time.

So I'm recording this on, what is it, Wednesday the 17th.

And hopefully if everything goes well, we'll post it today, this afternoon.

Also, this might be interesting, is Mary and I are most definitely producing our portions of the episodes independently.

I kinda go away and I check out my notes that I created right after I got out, and to jog my memory on what was happening on that day.

And then I write or record my episode.

And she does the same.

And we do that fairly independently and kinda come back together.

And I think that was particularly useful in days five and six, because this is where our perspectives really start to bifurcate or divert into very different directions.

And I wanted you to see that in episodes five and six, or day five and six, because that's essentially gonna be a pattern moving forward.

And really the whole time is this total misunderstanding, miscommunication thing.

And so you start to see, at least in these first few days or the first week, this issue, this miscommunication issue, where I have from the inside negotiated this 100K release amount.

I've then communicated to Gunny and to Diego, and to Aaron, that I want to do this.

And I think that I've put the pieces in place to execute it, because that's really what you need.

That's all you need in order to get all this done.

I had Aaron to unlock my money and to either wire it directly to Gunny or to Diego who could then import the money into the US through his government contacts and do that legally and get that money to Gunny, and then Gunny gets it to the gang and I'm out free.

Now, I'm not so naive as to think that everybody gets out on the first payment, but I believed through Diego and Gunny's expertise that we could do a live exchange for that kind of money and get me out safely.

Now, that's wrong thinking on a number of levels, and we'll talk about that later, but that's kind of the boat that I was in, was thinking that that's what I had set up, right?

And then I keep getting these weird messages from the outside through Aaron, because Mary is putting this team together of actual experts in kidnapping.

Now, Diego is awesome, but he's not an expert in kidnapping.

He's never negotiated any sort of a kidnapping scenario.

And while Gunny is certainly a capable security guy, this is not his expertise either.

He would have been fine, but Mary's putting together this world-class team on the outside.

But to further confuse the issue, she hasn't completely put that team together.

That's coming together as time progresses.

So, you heard Austin's name for the first time recently.

Well, Austin is world-class, but it takes Mary and Doug a few days to decide he's our guy.

And then once you decide that, now you've already got Gunny and Diego that I have kind of put in place as my guy.

And so that transition is really messy.

And so you're going to start to see that whole kind of process take place in a rough way, where I'm kind of still talking to Gunny because I think he's my guy, and I'm talking to Diego because I think he's my guy.

And that's going to shake out over the next probably week or so.

I haven't looked at it in the notes to see how long that takes.

But it'll be a while, and it's frustrating.

And I don't know how much of that will drag you through in terms of details, because it's really just kind of messy.

But maybe we'll keep that as part of the story line.

Maybe we'll just spare you all the drama and show you once it finally starts to shake out and we solve those issues.

But anyway, just know that that mess is kind of happening now.

I also wanted to mention, we've had some listeners ask about the role of the US government in getting us out.

Why didn't they do more?

Why didn't the FBI come to our rescue?

And that's a valid question.

However, I think it's important for people to understand that we did not expect them to come to our rescue.

At least I didn't.

Haiti is a level four do not travel country.

That means the State Department has a web page dedicated to Haiti that says, don't go, please don't go.

I think even in the process of buying tickets, you have to, flights to Haiti, you have to acknowledge that your country tells you not to go to this place.

And if bad things happen, very little can be done to help you.

So the people that are in Haiti doing work, they know this, right?

You're on your own.

So the fact that they were willing to help at all, and they did from an advisory role, yes, we would like for the full weight of the US government to come to your rescue, but the US government is a finite resource.

Hope that answered your question.

The second topic that I wanted to mention, so day seven is actually the day that Curvins gets out.

And yay for him, we were all very excited for him, because he had been in there for such a long time.

And while neither of us that remain, so there's three of us that remain now, it's Sarah and Stephanie and I.

Stephanie's name is her real name, Sarah's name is a replacement name, because I have not gotten her permission to use her real name.

But she's awesome, she's a 30-something mother of I believe two, wonderful woman, very kind, did not speak much English, and so anytime I spoke to her, I got better at my creole.

But she would laugh at me saying that, because my creole is poor.

And Stephanie would make fun of me as well.

So we were all glad for Curvins when he left, gave him hugs, and wished him well.

Other piece that I want to mention about day seven and eight is this is when I really started to think hard about escaping, and at least having an escape plan of sorts, to even think it through, to see if it was possible.

The funny part is on those early days, if anyone would ever mention escape, they would, first off, they would do it in English, and even then, whispering, right?

Because nobody wants to be heard by the guards.

For talking about something like that, for fear of retaliation, but anytime someone would bring it up, everyone had an opinion.

Because everyone's thinking it, right?

And everyone's thinking through how it might be possible to escape.

And it was pretty funny to hear people compare notes on that.

But by this time, day seven and eight, I've definitely thought about it a lot.

And just to kind of catch you guys up, you remember the room that we're in, and there's the two windows on the north and west sides of the building.

Those are the louvered glass with the bars on the outside of the building.

And then there's Chef Jeff's door.

It's an interior door.

When I say interior door, I mean it's a light door.

You know, one of those really thin, flimsy, balsa wood style doors that you could break through in an instant being a heavyweight dude like I am.

I weighed, I'm sure, well, I came in there weighing almost 250 pounds because I eat too much, and then probably at this point, I've maybe lost 10 pounds.

But still plenty of weight to get through one of those balsa wood doors.

And then the walking, the door that they walk in and out of, primarily, is also one of those really lightweight doors.

You know, it was funny on, I don't know, probably day two or three, I remember asking some of the long timers, why on earth does every guard that comes in here have a wooden spoon in his hand?

I was like, what are they doing?

Is it some sort of like status symbol?

Are they, like, because occasionally they would hit people with it, but it didn't, it wasn't, clearly it was not primarily a weapon.

And then the, I think it was Curvance who laughed and said that it was, it's a stick, they stick through where you would put a padlock.

So there's a latch on the outside of the door, and then they just stick this stick in there instead of having a padlock every time they come in and out, so it's just a matter of convenience.

And we later realized that we could actually climb up the wall, kind of spider climb up the wall, and that man door that they were coming in and out of, there was a window over the top of that door.

And the window's long since gone, so it's just an opening.

And so they can hear us really well, and of course, we can hear them also.

But if you climbed up that, kind of spider climbed up, you could reach over and pull that stick out, right?

And then you'd be outside.

We didn't figure that out for probably another couple of weeks.

But that's where that stick was.

And I just tell you that story to explain how easy it actually is to get out of this room.

The problem is, once you get out, you know, your problems start, right?

So you've got guards that live and sleep right in that kitchen slash kind of common area.

There's a mattress there where they sleep during the day.

And then right outside that is kind of a porch area, and that's where they hang out all day.

And there's, they're either holding the assault rifle or it's tipped up against the wall.

And we know that because that thin door also has like a little, like a, it used to be a drill hole in the door.

There was clearly, there was a screw that used to be in there.

And so now you can see through it.

You can't see very far because it's two holes that are what, like two inches apart from each other.

So it's just a very narrow view that you can see through, but you can see enough to know things like what I just mentioned.

And then later on, we would spider climb up that thing and look out when we're feeling brave.

But at this point, way too scared to do any of that, but we would occasionally peek out through the pinholes.

So you've got that, those two doors.

Chef Jeff's bedroom door, which is thin interior door material, then the one that all the guards come in and out of primarily.

And that's only being held with a stick.

And so clearly getting through those doors is not a problem.

Doing it quietly is a problem.

And then of course, once you get out, you have to deal with the guards themselves.

And then you've got the bathroom door, and then of course, the bathroom window, which is similar to the other windows, it's lubricated glass as well, and then bars on the outside.

This one just happens to be smaller.

And so those are kind of your normal options for escaping.

The problem is both of those doors, that you know, going through Chef Jeff's door or the common area slash kitchen door, is even if you get out, you know, now you've got violent solutions to get any further, right?

So we actually could just wait for the guards to come in the door, and then subduing a guard would be quite simple, but it would be most certainly violent, right?

So the idea of escalating to violence in the movies seems simple, but when it's really your life, you think deeply about it, right?

It's a frightening thing to even seriously consider.

And I remember pretty fitful nights as I would think through those scenarios in detail, moment by moment, in thinking of the specific guards that would be in certain places.

In the movies, you can just knock a guy out, and then you proceed quietly.

And while you might be able to do that, in reality, the line between knocking someone out sufficiently to where you could be confident they would be unconscious for a predictable amount of time, the line between doing that and just killing the man is a very thin line.

And so when you escalate to that kind of violence, you can expect that kind of violence in return, right?

And being in gang territory, I've got to get past this guy and about 200 other soldiers in this area.

And so it's not just about subduing one guy and stealing his AR-15, and then you're free, right?

There's a lot of violence that would have to happen.

Once you start that violence, then it gets tricky.

And so it's incredibly high risk.

So those solutions of going out that door or going through Chef's door are either too loud and thus violent, or you have to start violent and then proceed.

So I essentially eliminated those options for all those reasons to which I just referred, but held them as possibilities in worse case scenarios.

On top of the fact that I don't want to kill these guys.

A lot of our guards were just very low level dudes.

They called them Fatra, which means trash.

They didn't use their name.

So Chef Jeff, anytime he's talking to one of the guards, they call him trash, right?

And they answer to it.

Anyway, I'm not saying you should pity these dudes, but I don't fault them to the point of where I would consider it trivial to decide to kill one of them.

Anyway, so sorry for the heavy thoughts, but so I just eliminated those options.

So I've got to figure out something else.

So if it's not one of those, how do you get out?

How do you escape?

So I could go through the ceiling as well.

It's simple T-bar ceiling.

You may recall that the Toussaint and Curvins had told us about a previous captive who tried to escape through the ceiling, made a bunch of noise, and was caught, and they pulled him out of the ceiling.

Well, he went up through one of the ceiling tiles in our bathroom.

And you could still see that ceiling tile was missing.

He had destroyed it in the process when they ripped him out of the ceiling.

And so that allowed me to peek up in there.

I stood on the countertop in the bathroom and peeked up in there, and I could see that, yeah, you could climb up, but you can't really get out unless you go through the actual roof, which was a tin roof that was riveted together.

And so I could conceivably back those rivets out, but I couldn't think of a way that I could do that quietly.

And so while that was still a possibility, and I often thought of that and how I could do it quietly, maybe during a rainstorm or something to that, because that roof got really loud during the rainstorm and that might cover some of your noise.

It was a possibility, but not a good one.

So most of my attention focused on bending the bars on the windows, or somehow breaking the way that the bars were attached to the house itself.

And so the bars were pretty thick.

They're like rebar that you would see in an American home.

But that rebar, those bars, were on the other side of the glass louvers.

And so it was tricky to conceive of how I could even get to those bars quietly.

And so somewhere around this time, day seven or eight, I actually figured out how to get the glass louvers detached.

So they were kind of on there with a thin aluminum clip, and I was able to bend that clip away sufficiently to where I could slide the glass out quietly and then slide it back in.

And I tested that theory in the bathroom because the bathroom, you could close the door and you had a little bit more time.

If a guard walked in to the room, you would hear him do that because you'd hear the spoon get pulled out of the latch and then they come in the room.

So I had a hope that I could undo anything that I was doing pretty quickly.

And then the glass on the other side of the glass louver and the bars in the bathroom was this thick, silver, opaque, plastic tarp.

And so I would be, no one would see me in the bathroom screwing around with these glass louvers.

And so I figured that out somewhere around this day, days seven and eight, and thought about figuring out a way to bend those bars.

And so I tried to bend them just with my arms to kind of understand how strong this iron or steel was.

And they were very strong.

They run horizontal, but then they're supported by a diagonal bar that's welded along the way.

So you get these kind of polygon, trapezoid shapes repeated as you go up and down.

And so they're well-conceived.

Whoever built them did it well.

And so I had just kind of estimated how much weight or pressure I could put on those bars and figured I was putting about 200 pounds of pressure on the bar just by putting one hand on one bar and one hand on the other and then pulling in opposite directions, and they weren't budging.

So I had estimated I probably need somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 pounds of pressure to bend those bars.

So my brain started to go to work on figuring out how to apply that kind of pressure.

Anyway, that's probably enough escape talk for now.

We'll see what Mary has to say for today.

“The day is spent gathering intel from the Toussaint.They are extremely willing to share any information that will help us, even though they have only been home a day and are still suffering from shock.We are also making sure we are prepared for the inevitable ransom payments.There is a lot that goes into these.You have to have US cash in country, so someone has to take it there, which can only be done in increments of 10,000 at a time.My sister-in-law, Erin’s wife, Rachel, and I were tasked with meeting a buddy of Jeff’s early in the morning at the airport to exchange the cash, as he was going to take the money into Port-au-Prince for us and give it to the security team.My sweet sister-in-law, Rachel, and I felt like we were in a movie, a terrible movie.To this day, Jeff and I can’t watch movies that have to do with kidnappings, and you’d be surprised how many do.The next step, we needed a courier that was willing to interface with the gang and to make the exchange.This is the trickiest piece of the puzzle because this individual needs to be trusted by our team as well as the gang.It is not unheard of to have your courier kidnapped as well.So typically, this role is someone who ends up screwing both sides a little in the end, and both sides just kind of know this is the case and make allowances for the courier’s corruption.It’s a bizarre world I’ve been thrown into, to say the least.So we are focused on these tasks in any downtime that we have.I’m beginning to really know the team that we have is a godsend.I’m being taught that the quicker we can make sure that Jeff isn’t in charge of anything, the quicker he gets home.We mostly need Jeff to stop making plans around us, but we can’t communicate any of that to him because the gang is always listening.The frustration of this is really hard.I know Jeff’s personality better than anyone, and he’s used to being the guy in charge.And so it’s very hard for him to sit back and let others do that, especially with the stakes we are dealing with.I know this, and I keep telling my team that it’s going to be hard to get Jeff to just sit and wait to be saved.We all underestimated just how hard that would be.Day seven was hard because we never heard from Jeff.Most days, someone at least heard or got a text from him or the gang.And in those early days, when we didn’t quite know the gang’s MO, we wanted proof of life as much as possible.The value of human life is pretty low in these gangs.I am being told that they are usually scared to hurt Americans.I believe it some of the time.The truth is that the level of violence seemed to depend on the guard, and one of Jeff’s guards was just evil.Day eight, we are prepping to make a payment.The gang is feigning that payment for other prisoners aren’t making it to them, so we need a test run.This is all a ploy to get more money, or so we thought, but our team knows we will undoubtedly pay more than once, so we are just anxious to start the process.”

— Mary