A gentle lie-in came to a dramatic end for one Washington couple when a badly beaten woman hammered on their door claiming she had escaped a kidnapper.
Gary and Robin Marcello were still asleep when the 27-year-old woman arrived barefoot and bleeding at the door of their home in Gig Harbor at 10am on a Saturday morning last month.
Newly released bodycam footage shows the moment first responders arrived at the house and helped the injured woman to a nearby ambulance before closing in on the attacker’s home.
‘Gary brought her inside and closed the door to just kind of protect us for a minute,’ Robin said.
‘And she just kept saying ‘he’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me’.’
Paramedics helped the badly beaten kidnap victim from her rescuers’ home
Gary and Robin Marcello were still asleep when the 27-year-old woman arrived barefoot and bleeding at the door of their home in Gig Harbor, Washington State
The first responders attempted to find out what had happened to the young woman
‘There was so much blood, I couldn’t really tell where exactly it was coming from.
‘It was coming from her head and her ears.’
Their peace was shattered when their doorbell started to ring incessantly and Gary went to the door.
‘Came out, by the time I got out here, there was nobody here,’ he told Kiro7.
‘And I walked out and looked to my left and there’s a young lady there.
‘Turned around and her face had blood all over it.
‘And it was ‘get in the house.’ We brought her in. My wife took over from there.’
The woman told them she had run from the house a quarter-mile away as the couple called 911.
‘It was obvious she was bleeding from her head and her ear and I couldn’t really tell all where she’d been hit,’ said Robin who has first-aid training.
‘But when I tried to hold her and move her because she started to slump forward, it was hurting her to hold her arms, to hold her.
‘And then she went into shock and fell to the floor.’
Robin Marcello who used her own first-aid training to help the woman watched on from he doorstep as she was taken away to hospital from her home
The woman had run a quarter-mile in bare feet to the couple’s home in Gig Harbor after escaping her kidnapper’s home nearby
The barely-conscious woman was able to tell her rescuers where she had been held captive
Gig Harbor Police Chief Kelly Busey said the woman had been abducted days earlier and held captive by David Paul Ruffier, 66.
‘As she tried to flee the house, he tried to prevent her from doing that,’ he added.
‘And he hit her several times with a piece of furniture, a chair leg, or something like that.
‘She was heavily injured, she’d had lacerations to her head, and she was panicked.’
The video shows paramedics carrying the injured woman out of the Marcello’s paramedics and trying to glean some details of the attack as she is stretchered off to an ambulance.
‘Can you tell me who did this to you?’ one asks.
‘You don’t know? Was it a family member? Do you live near here? Where do you live?
‘We want to go talk to this guy. Can you tell me how to find him?’
The woman raised a finger to point towards her attacker’s home.
‘Which way? That way,’ the paramedic confirmed.
The video then shows police arriving at Ruffier’s home before pounding at the door.
‘You see the blood drops?’ one remarks grimly, ‘Those aren’t from us.’
Inside they found Ruffier dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and the home was filled with smoke and the smell of chemicals.
Police found blood on the porch of David Ruffier’s home when they arrived moments later
Inside they found Ruffier had attempted to set the home on fire before shooting himself dead
‘It’s tough because the victim in this case really doesn’t have a lot of recollection, she doesn’t even recall where she met the man or how long she had been at this location, that’s becoming a little tough,’ said Chief Busey.
The woman was later released from hospital after treatment for her injuries.
‘It kind of shakes you that you didn’t know that was going on, you didn’t know that person was capable of that and we’re just here going about our lives, Gary told KING.
‘We hope that anybody who has something like that happen, that they do the same thing,’ added Robin.