The Four Survival Rules to Live By

"but lets say she fought him. 11 years later she might not be breathing. She could have been killed that night instead of just regretting 'not fighting' By the way Im pretty sure she didnt prosecute, she should regret not prosecting and she wouldn't be regretting not fighting. That's how rape victims fight back, after the fact not when it is going on. Too big, too strong, too much of an advantage. "

but the fact is women have repeatedly fought off or escaped from rapists that were physically bigger and stronger. it's not like they're locked in a cage, alone, and only one person gets to leave.

how many attackers will continue if the victim is able to keep fighting and keep screaming for 30 seconds?

"who is faster, the wolf or the rabbit? the rabbit is faster because the wolf is only losing a meal, and the rabbit is losing his life"

Sanford Strong is a great name for a self defense guy.

 

WARNING;  THIS CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE!!

This was found on Sandford Strong's website:  sanfordstrong.com

Frank Faizones Story
Inspector Falzone, San Francisco Police Department, recounts his worst case: San Francisco, April 19, 1974: Annette Carlson and her husband, Frank, a couple in their twenties. It was a Friday, about midnight. A male suspect invaded the old Victorian home they had painstakingly renovated. It was an extremely beautiful house in a middle-class neighbor-hood near San Francisco General Hospital, not a high-crime area. The suspect gained entry by climbing into the upstairs bedroom area. Annette had just gone to bed. Frank was still downstairs with work he had brought home. Startled, Annette screamed. Frank ran upstairs. The suspect had a knife. He told them they wouldn't be harmed. "I only want money," he said. Holding the knife on Annette, he ordered both of them downstairs into the living room. The knife on Annette controlled them both.

Frank Carlson tried to reason with the intruder. He kept pleading, "Please, please, we'll give you anything you want. Just don't hurt us." The suspect then cut the electrical cords off various lamps in the living-room and front-room area, then used the cords to tie Frank to one of the dining-room chairs. The Carlsons still did not resist or try to escape in any way. Threatened and controlled by the knife, they were paralyzed with fear.

The intruder demanded money again. Annette was sent upstairs to get the money. The suspect guarded Frank with the knife. Sadly, this case is typical of how easily intruders control people, even send them to other parts of the home to get money, rope, whatever, while one family member is guarded.

Annette returned with a jar containing about six dollars in coins. The suspect was livid. "You don't call this money! This is ridiculous! I want money!" Swearing angrily, he demanded, "Do you have a hammer?" She answered yes. Another typical and sad part of this case and many similar to it—few citizens understand the viciousness of criminals. Newspaper and TV news stories seldom detail all the crimes committed. Any experienced cop would have known there's only one reason he wanted a hammer. She went into the kitchen and returned with a hammer. He again demanded money. She said, "This is all the money we have right now. We can write you a check." Suddenly the suspect began beating Frank in the head with the hammer. Tied to the chair, he could not protect himself. The escalation of violence against isolated or bound innocent victims is always sudden.


WARNING;  THIS CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE!!


It was a carpenter's hammer with a wooden handle. He actually broke the head of the hammer off the handle, he hit Frank's skull with such force. As is often the case, the intruder went into a killing frenzy. He then picked up a potted plant and smashed it into Frank's head. I'm talking about a potted plant with a circumference of about eighteen inches, big and heavy. Then the suspect grabbed a three-inch-thick cutting board and began smashing Frank's head again. He swung so hard a corner of the board broke off. As is so often in cases involving armed intruders, Annette was forced to witness her husband's murder.


Annette was screaming but she felt that nothing was coming out anymore. Probably didn't matter, the suspect had turned the stereo way up. Annette was horrified, but even worse, she was paralyzed. The suspect then grabbed the thick glass jar filled with coins and smashed it over Frank's head. By that time Frank was dead. During the trial, the coroner of San Francisco testified that he had never seen a human skull so destroyed.


The suspect then forced Annette upstairs. His words were, "When I'm high on coke, I can fuck for hours." Annette pleaded, "Please don't kill me." Then the raping began. Oral, anal, everything, without stopping. He did everything. He raped her for three hours. Annette pleaded, "Please, just let me live." He laughed and looked straight at her and said, I can't let you live, you know who I am. I have to kill you."


Three hours of rape—finally he was through with that second phase of crimes. Then he began another killing frenzy. He picked up a small rocking chair, Annette's childhood chair, and began beating her with it, fracturing her jaw, dislocating her shoulder, and ripping open her head. The rocking chair was crushed into many pieces. He then picked up a towel from the bathroom and wrapped it around a paperweight rock from her dresser. With tremendous force, he swung that makeshift weapon at her head over and over. Every time he hit her, flesh ripped from her head.


WARNING;  THIS CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE!!


Annette rolled onto the floor, bleeding profusely. "Please just let me die, don't hit me again, please don't hit me again. Just let me die," she begged. Every time she pleaded, he laughed. He then sliced her wrists with his knife, left her, and went downstairs.


I know I'm being graphic. I'm relating this case as it happened—without any sugarcoating. If reading this helps some families prepare against our worst criminals, and there are no worse than armed intruders, maybe some good will finally come out of this case.


Because the Carlsons had been remodeling their home, they had paint thinner and kerosene around. The killer doused Frank's body, then he went upstairs and doused Annette with the flammable liquid before dropping matches upstairs and downstairs. Then he fled.


Annette, bloodied and broken, miraculously crawled out the same window the suspect used to enter the house. From the rooftop, she screamed for help. Neighbors heard and saved her.


Big-city homicide investigators are seasoned, but we were stunned at what we saw. The house was almost destroyed upstairs but the fire had extinguished itself downstairs.


When I got to the hospital, the doctors had shaved Annette's hair off. Her head was like a large orange with big chunks of skin missing. The doctor looked upset and angry when he said to me, "I'm going to let you into the operating room because we don't expect her to live. So, while we're operating, we're going to let you try and talk to her. I hope you can catch the bastard." They scrubbed me up, dressed me in surgical greens, and let me in with the surgical team to talk to Annette. The whole time this brave woman believed she was dying and knew her husband was dead and still did her best to talk to me. I was a police officer and homicide detective for twenty-eight years. In all these years, I've never been more proud to be a cop and part of a team trying to bring a monster to justice.


Annette gave a near perfect description of the suspect. For five weeks I visited her at the hospital trying to find out what we might have missed, what we could do that we weren't doing. Her father was a design engineer and an artist. He wanted to help. I said, "The jewelry that was taken, if you could draw what those pieces look like, I'll put out a wanted bulletin and see if we can't come up with a break in this case." Many of the stolen items were antiques, mostly family heirlooms. He drew some perfect pictures.


WARNING;  THIS CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE!!


A month or two later when we figured the pieces would be hitting the pawn shops and jewelry stores, I went to friends at the Chronicle and Channel 7. 1 asked them to please put out a public plea for anybody that might have seen these pieces of jewelry. They jumped on it—in less than twenty-four hours I got a phone call from a jewelry designer who had just come across a ring that matched our description. I ran down to the store, got the ring, and headed to the hospital. I remember this day like yesterday. There are good days and bad days being a career cop—this was one of the good ones.


Annette took one look at the ring and started crying. It had been her grandmother's. The nurses were crying, and I have to be honest with you, I got a big lump in my throat, too. That ring broke the case. We backtracked that ring two times and finally came up with the suspect.


What the Carisons Did Wrong
Sadly, as with most couples, no survival decisions were made ahead of time. They were not prepared for the privacy of their home to become a place of terror and isolation. Instead, the attacker used their ties of family love and loyalty against them. It always happens. He was able to cut cords off lamps, tie Frank up, and send Annette to other rooms to get things. Through fear he controlled them completely even though they were sometimes in separate rooms.


For the Record
The intruder was sentenced to death, but in 1978, the California Supreme Court reversed all death penalties. Chief Justice Rose Bird made a public statement that she did not believe in putting any criminal to death. In Frank Falzones words,"While a prisoner, he has married and fathered two children, something he deprived Annette and Frank of. Now he comes up for parole every two years. It's a crime what families go through."


The preceding is from Sanford Strongs website and are excepts from his book.

Sam Pai, Read the book and it is very good info, The Gift of Fear is another Great book for anyone to read. Chatboardbully, you have no clue what you are talking about. Your comments about most rapists wanting to nut shows your ignorance. Most rapist don't nut, it's more about control and degradation than sex. The advice in Strongs book is sound and although it is not going to save %100 of the people, nothing will. The ONLY reason some scumbag changes crime scenes is because he cannot do at one what he wants, which is usually torture, kill, or rape.

Thor is correct, "Strong on Defense" and "The Gift Of Fear" should be in everyone's library.  If you have kids, Gavin DeBecker's book, "Protecting The Gift" is also a must read.

Gary Hughes

Chatboardbully Please don't ever teach self defense to anyone, Chang too. Your advice is to just give in. Thats brilliant bumpkin.

It's my hope that Chang and any who agreed with him will see that this position is not advisable and re-evaluate.    

ChaTBoardBully is a useless troll and beyond all hope.  One can only wonder whether the Bully submitted willingly to sexual advances when he was in jail.

Gary, if you can, reprint the story in Protecting the gift where the lady beats off the Rapist after hearing her baby cry. She dosn't remember the incident herself but her neighbors could hear her yelling "you fucked with the wrong person. Classic maniac strength story.

It appears The Bully has a hidden agenda.

pack a mini .22 in your sock and pop the guy in the face....he loses...game over.

MURDER IN PUBLIC PLACES
excerpt from pages 136-138



If somebody walks in and starts shooting, it's not the time to hide under tables. So few people risk trying to escape because of paralyzing fear. We train our police officers to deal with fear by channeling it into reaction decisions. Planning and decisions about how to survive a killer don't guarantee anything, except better odds than everyone around you.
JERRY SANDERS,
CHIEF OF POLICE, SAN DIEGO (RET)

As with any explosive and violent crime, a mass murder scene demands two basic abilities to give you a better chance of survival:

1. Intense concentration on escape: This enables survivors to block out everything unimportant at that instant—fear, pain, confusion—and channel their mind and body to one survival aim: escape. That kind of concentration begins with an attitude of willingness to take extreme risks during extreme danger.

2. Survivors are those whose reaction time is measured in split seconds. That begins with survival decisions made ahead of time. Keep your response immediate, direct, and explosive.

At four in the afternoon on July 18, 1984, James Huberty walked into the McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, carrying three high-power semi-automatic guns. Almost immediately he began shooting people at random. Families cowered under tables, parents tried to protect their children, fear paralyzed everyone. He reloaded all three weapons two separate times and prowled the room, finishing off anyone he found still alive. He fired over 250 rounds at police and citizens until a SWAT sniper on a nearby rooftop finally took him out with one round to the 10-ring (center of the chest). He had killed twenty-one and wounded nineteen.

Never before in U.S. history had there been a mass murder of that magnitude. At that time, Jerry Sanders, my former partner and chief of police of San Diego (ret), was the commanding officer of SWAT and the officer in charge. In Jerry's words, "That crime scene changed me more than any I have experienced. That massacre helped me to understand more fully the value of playing out in my mind what I plan to do if the worst goes down, not only planning for when I'm on duty, but for when I'm off duty too, with my family. It's the most important step you can take to stay alive. Now I'm never mentally off duty. If the shooting ever starts, your reactions must be instantaneous and subconscious."

Whether you create a diversion, throw something through a window, or just jump through it, do it immediately and don't let anything stop you. Getting cut up going through a window is rather minor, compared to the alternative. It's a matter of priorities—getting hurt and cut up versus getting killed.

In 1991, in Killeen, Texas, another massacre, almost identical to that at McDonald's, occurred in Luby's Cafeteria: A lone, heavily armed gunman entered the restaurant. In San Ysidro, he walked in; in Killeen, he drove his pickup truck through the windows into the main dining room. The killer began shooting diners without warning, selecting victims at random.

My friend Al Morris and two other officers of the Killeen Police Department entered Luby's under fire and shot the frenzied gunman; twenty-three people were dead.

The one difference between the Killeen massacre and the San Ysidro one was a simple, heroic act by one man, Tommy Vaughn.

Vaughn was having lunch with friends in Luby's main dining room when the truck drove through the window and the gunman started shooting. Immediately, Vaughn picked up his table and attempted to heave it through the plate-glass window. The table bounced off—the window held. Without hesitating, he charged the window and shattered the glass with his body. Although he was badly cut, he escaped. Immediate reaction and leadership saved his life and that of those who followed him.

Vaughn overcame the paralyzing fear that enveloped everyone else in the room and survived. For all of us, the survival equalizer, the odds reducer, is not size, gender, age, or type of gun, it's our immediate reaction that counts most.

 

For More: Book 1/Rhonda's Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

DevonMichael...the rules apply whether you are armed or unarmed.

Most of us do not live in states that allow the legal carrying of a handgun. Even if we did the same mindset still stands. A lot of people have been
waylaid before they could even get their guns out because they were not paying attention to their surrondings.

Increased awareness and mental preparation will increase your odds of survival greatly.   

interesting thread Sam Pai - first time I have heard and/or thought about the 'second crime scene' stuff.

Opash...it's not a pleasant subject, but if you take a few minutes to think about different scenarios and mentally rehearse your response, you will be steps ahead of the game if it really happens to you.  When you hear about a crime happening to someone, put yourself in the victims place and think of how you would handle the situation.  Realizing that you will probably get injured and visualizing yourself overcoming your attacker after getting injured is also beneficial.  Adrenaline was designed to help you either fight or run (flight).  It was not designed to make you freeze up in fear.  Fear is your friend.  If your mind floats under duress and after the adrenaline dump, your training and mental preparation will help get you back on track.

Note:  Lots of stories I have read from crime victims start with them ignoring a bad feeling they had about someone.  If it happened to them again, they would trust their intuition.  I alway say, "learn from others mistakes, it's less painful".

Gary Hughes

I am not paranoid, I know that the world is out to get me!