00:00my hand was trapped under my belly and i could actually feel my intestines coming out and i knew
00:10i am either going to lay here and i'm going to die or i need to stand up to survive
00:16a colorado woman is recovering from a terrifying ordeal a pregnant woman who was stabbed
00:23and had a baby removed from her womb stay with me don't go to sleep you stay on the phone with me
00:28okay i looked at her i just my head wasn't able to wrap around it
00:32here is my baby shower yeah i was really happy nothing has entered my awareness of what could
00:55go wrong it's just i'm gonna have a baby i was only 26 at the time that i got pregnant the first
01:05thing that my partner of the time said was i can't wait to buy her her first pair of hiking boots
01:11we really had a love of the outdoors and when we came across aurora it just felt totally right
01:19we had pretty much gotten everything we needed except for the crib i had sent out a text responding
01:27to the craigslist ad for maternity clothes dinel responded back to me so i left i went to her house
01:36when i walked in the door she immediately greeted me laid out the clothes showed them to me put them in a
01:45bag i'm a friendly person so i was just chatting with her eventually time started to tick on and
01:54she's continuing to chat disregarding some of the cues that i'm ready to go so i decided
02:01okay i'll walk us over to the door and she says oh i have some girl clothes that somebody gifted me
02:11before we found out it was a boy are you interested i knew in the moment i didn't need them but i out of
02:18the desire to be polite and just curiosity i said okay sure she closed the door in front of me
02:25and we walked downstairs and she was looking she was seeming very frantic as she searched the shelves
02:31and i just had this feeling wash over me like i have everything i need so i just said thank you you
02:36have such a lovely home and i turned around and started walking towards the door and that's when
02:43she approached me from behind she struck me over the back of my heart it was such a strange contact
02:50but then she continued like kind of wrestling with my sweater almost like she was scratching she was
02:55hitting i wasn't even quite sure what was going on so i pushed myself off of her i lifted up my hands
03:01and i said i don't want to hurt you i just want to leave she grabbed me bodily and tried to start
03:08shoving me down the hall so we're wrestling in the hall and eventually she shoves me into the back
03:15bedroom brutalizing me with fists with hands with scratching she shoved me backwards onto a bed
03:21i was thrashing so much that she actually grabbed the lava lamp next to the bed and broke it over my head
03:28i was seeing stars totally disoriented i had been screaming just before that moment why why why are you
03:37doing this and then she stabbed the lava lamp into my neck i just thought to myself how is this how i die
03:45and then i lost consciousness
03:47when i woke up i was no longer on the bed i was on the floor and i was really groggy everything seemed
04:00to be slowly trickling back in and as i looked down to my belly i just saw a gash from hip to hip and
04:07you know i had lost a lot of blood so i wasn't really able to comprehend i realized okay i'm not in
04:14a condition to climb out of the window if she's still in the house i'm not in a condition that i
04:18can outrun her i can stand up i can go lock the door when i stood up i had no blood in my feet and
04:26i actually just fell forward my hand was trapped under my belly and i could actually feel my intestines
04:35coming out over my arm and i knew i am either gonna lay here and i'm gonna die or i need to stand up
04:42i really somehow willed myself into standing my phone was next to the bed so i called 9-1-1 from
04:49there tell me what happened she cut me who cut you i don't know okay hold on please i'm down there
05:00what did she cut you with she cut you in your stomach i'm bleeding out i know you need to stay
05:14on the phone with me okay i'm getting everybody to you okay i remember when they arrived
05:22they immediately came to my side and one of the police later told me she thought this couldn't have
05:39been the person that made the call the person that made the call was pregnant so they searched
05:44they searched the house and um there was nobody else but me one of the other police officers is is
05:55looking at my wounds and just lifts my maternity pants and says jesus during the court case a lot came
06:04out about what was happening while i was unconscious she was first of all removed my daughter from my
06:13belly with a kitchen knife she put her in the upstairs bathtub and then she began cleaning up
06:22and at some point her partner came home early the whole premise of this attack was so that she had
06:29a fetus to present to her partner so that she could say look i had a miscarriage because she had been
06:35faking a pregnancy for over 10 months she heard me waking up in the basement she convinced him at that
06:42point that they needed to go to the hospital and bring aurora the nurses told me that she ran in saying
06:51save my baby save my baby they were sort of assuming miscarriage for her and the ob-gyn got called into
06:59emergency surgery for me and it was the same hospital so that's actually how they tracked her down
07:05i remember waking up in the hospital my aunt was there she was the first family member to arrive
07:17and i asked the question with my eyes because my uh nose and my mouth it was full of all the tubes and
07:26she said aurora didn't make it so this is a picture of this is a picture of aurora they took dinelle away
07:42and one of the detectives took this picture for me he just thought i would want
07:48would want a picture of her i didn't get to meet aurora until after she had gotten an autopsy i feel
07:57really grateful for that moment it sort of had this bizarre quality in a way because i'm doing all of
08:05these things that i would do when you're meeting your daughter i was dressing her i was singing to her
08:12i was reading her a story i sang you are my sunshine which my mom used to sing to me all the time
08:20yeah it was like a hello and a goodbye
08:26breaking news now out of boulder county a very disturbing story developing in colorado tonight
08:30i do want to warn you the details are disturbing sensationalism was selling and so there was a
08:37real focus on the brutality and some of the language was just meant to sell because it was so
08:43horrifying she was covered from head to toe in blood who had her unborn child cut from her womb
08:49the ptsd was brutal nightmares flashbacks not just in the cognitive sense but also like physically
09:00i developed asthma for the next couple years and i felt like there was like this physical memory of
09:05not being able to breathe for a while i really closed down my world to be very limited just having
09:12this really sensitive hair trigger to the world to how fast things were moving i had to navigate just
09:18quite a bit in the upcoming years so today the trial begins people are hungry to hear from miss lane
09:28to hear why you did this how did you ever learn how to trust strangers again yeah i believed before the
09:38attack happened in the goodness of people and in a surprising paradoxical way i would say actually it
09:47was reaffirmed for one person that wanted to do bodily harm or harm me there were like thousands of
09:55people in my direct community alone much less the world who wanted to make my life better all the
10:03attorneys even the police officers i think all felt very protective of me there was something really
10:12profound in witnessing people come together to feel protective and loving towards you it elicited
10:20something really deep in a lot of people which is like this could have been any of us this could have been me
10:29yeah here is stan garnett this is after we had learned that um dinelle was found guilty on all counts
10:39i think i always knew that i wanted to be a therapist but when i went through my own dark night of the soul
10:58i decided i wanted to help other people in that journey she was introduced to me by a mutual friend
11:05who thought she would be a great addition to our clinical team and i remember catching myself
11:11feeling protective of her it became very quickly apparent that i did not need to protect her
11:18i mean the colloquial wisdom tells us that our struggles are really what shape us the most painful
11:25experience that i've ever been through has also been the source of so many beautiful things
11:30uh this is a really special one so this came from one of the nurses on the maternity ward she had this
11:39ability to blow glass but she would put ashes inside of it so they're aurora's ashes inside of this blown
11:48glass heart such a gift to me you know to have something beautiful encasing her ashes
11:56and that's what i wanted to do with her parents do you still want to have kids yeah it took me a long time
12:03a lot of people asked that question because they wanted relief on my behalf that i could have
12:09kids again and that i wanted it and that this future hadn't been somehow stolen from me but the truth
12:14is that it was that future that daughter was taken from me and now i can really be with
12:26the grief and the loss of that and dream into a new future in which i do want kids
12:33ellie is the essence of post-traumatic growth and i've witnessed over the years her share her story
12:39and time and time again she's just continued to to show how whole and well she is around her
12:46experience and how generous she is in caring for others as she shares it feels like no effort no
12:53thread that i followed and woven back into my life in the healing process has gone wasted
12:59i don't identify actually with having ptsd anymore and i think this is something that as a therapist i'm
13:06realizing i don't think we talk about ptsd as like a treatable and healable thing so i feel that i'm
13:15i'm very deeply healed
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