The Ultimate Pair of Flip Flops

[Ovis]

By ANNE AURAND
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 17, 2006)
Tammy Griffin was sleeping when gunmen pushed their way into her vacation home in Mexico. Before she realized what was happening, two men had pistol-whipped her husband, taped his hands and feet and ransacked the house for valuables to steal. Then they kidnapped her, hoping to collect a ransom.

It happened Oct. 5.

On Monday, Griffin was back home in Muldoon, sipping coffee in her townhouse, smoking Merits and calmly describing how she outsmarted her captors and escaped, fleeing to freedom through the dark jungle in flip-flops.

Griffin, a regional manager for The Hotel Group, and her husband Mike Griffin, a general contractor, lost at least $15,000 worth of stuff in the robbery, she said. But she doesn't care much about that. The redhead, born and raised in Alaska, is glad to be alive.

The Griffins are building a home on a beach north of Ixtapa, a tourist destination near Zihuatanejo, on Mexico's southern Pacific coast. Someday they plan to spend winters there. The guest house is built. That's where they were when it happened.

It was the day after her 46th birthday, around 7:30 p.m. Tammy was napping in the bedroom, recovering from celebrating the night before. Mike was lying on the couch.

He saw a young Mexican couple who take care of a nearby house walking toward him with two men he didn't recognize. He opened the door. The strange men showed him .45-caliber pistols.

They tied up the caretaker couple -- the woman was very pregnant. They covered Mike's eyes with gauze, bound his feet and taped him to a chair.

When someone approached the house outside, one of the men slapped Mike on the side of the head with his gun and told him, "Don't make a sound," Mike said.

"I slept through all this," Tammy said. She was irritated when Mike woke her up, yelling to bring him a pair of shorts that had hundreds of dollars in pesos in a pocket. He told her: "We're being robbed."

The men took cell phones, laptops, cash, jewelry. But they weren't satisfied. So they took Tammy and said Mike could have her back for $3 million.

"When they said three million I said, 'I'm dead meat,' " Tammy said. The Griffins don't have that kind of money.

The men gave Mike a cell phone so they could call him and arrange to get the ransom.

Tammy slid into some flip-flops before the men led her away. At her house Monday, she fetched the dirty, off-white, leather-strapped sandals that carried her through the muddy jungle. She held them like a star athlete showing a trophy.

The men drove north in the Griffins' rented Jeep, with Tammy's hands tied. She paid close attention to everything.

"I wanted to know where I was going," she said.

She studied her captors and stayed calm. She kept telling herself, "I'm smarter than them," she said. "I had confidence that sooner or later they'd make a mistake."

After about 15 minutes of driving, as it was getting dark, they stopped in a field. She asked one man for a smoke. He stuck a lit cigarette in her mouth. She asked nicely if he'd untie her hands. He did.

"So we sat in the field and smoked a cigarette," she said. Soon some other men showed up. They put her into a different car, a four-door Chevy, and drove north along a dirt road into the mountains.

About a half-hour later, they stopped at a clearing and settled in for the night. They gave her a mat and some blankets. They brought her hot food and cold water, she said.

"They were kind to me," she said. They brought her an umbrella when it started to rain and a chair to sit on.

It was about 3 a.m., she estimated, when she realized only one person was left guarding her and he was sleeping. She grabbed some toilet paper and tiptoed away, figuring she'd use a bathroom break as her excuse for moving if caught. Her heart pounded.

Slowly she put some distance between her and her captor, then broke into a run down a path for about a half-mile, stepping on rocks so as not to leave footprints in the mud. She found a creek and followed it.

She wasn't scared of the woods, she said: There's no bears, after all. Tammy has lived in rural Alaska, in homes without running water. She hunts and fishes. She's taken a moose. But "I'm not some Rambo woman," she said with a smile. She's a tad over 5 feet, about 120 pounds. She runs occasionally but doesn't consider herself very athletic.

She figures she covered about three miles in five hours. Sometimes the vines were so thick and tangled she had to backtrack or crawl on her hands and knees to make progress. Eventually she stopped and waited for the sun to rise so she could see where she was going.

At dawn on the morning of Oct. 6, she walked into a village and found a grocery store. She called police and within 15 minutes, three trucks of cops arrived. They already knew her story.

Back at the house, Mike had freed himself after the men took Tammy. He spent the night calling desperately for help. Friends scoured the area searching for her.

"Mike had a much rougher night than I did," Tammy said.

"Hell would be an understatement," Mike said.

Fifteen hours after it began, they were together. It was over.

Because she could identify the men and their car, Tammy stayed in Mexico to help with the investigation. She said that as many as seven men may have been involved. She wants every one of them caught.

She led police to the place where she was held. They found a house about 200 yards from the clearing and a chair she recognized. A man ran from the home into the jungle when they arrived. Police eventually arrested two people in the house as accomplices, she said, but they weren't the men who grabbed or held her.

The local newspaper, Despertar de la Costa, identified one of the men arrested for the robbery and kidnapping as Rigoberto Rendon Mercado.

The same day Tammy escaped, two men were found shot to death a couple miles away. Mike Griffin is convinced they were involved, maybe shot for letting Tammy get away. The Mexican police don't agree.

So have their Mexico retirement plans changed? No way.

"Giving up on a dream is simply not an option," Tammy said.

They will be adding high-tech security and dogs to the layout, she said. She's even a little paranoid now about locking the doors in Muldoon, she admitted. Weird things can happen anywhere.

Scott McMurren, a travel columnist for the Daily News, said he's never heard of kidnappings in that part of Mexico. It's a popular destination for Alaskans, he said, because Alaska Airlines offers daily flights there from Los Angeles.

While Tammy took a phone call from the FBI on Monday, her 20-year-old son, Taylor Tanner, said his mom has the ability to stay calm and composed in stressful situations. And she's good with people. She's smart, he said.

Tanner and two sisters didn't know what happened to their mom until it was all over, something he's grateful for.

"It made me wish I'd have given her a bigger hug before she left," he said. "You never think someone is going to kidnap your mother."

 

[Moosie]

WOW.. Flip flops aren't just for Hunting anymore.......

If Elkchsr hear's this he can add it to his Finding rocks for Survival list !!!!!!

I don't know why but I read that entire story......... Gesh !!!