Elina Tafoya

A Still Small Voice & A Gunshot

On Wednesday November 14th I was babysitting for a friend in East Nashville, and as I was getting into my car to drive home a man opened the passenger door, got inside, and held me hostage in my car for about an hour. I remember the first thought I had in my mind was “I must have forgotten something in the house and my friend Janna is running out to to stop me from leaving,” until I realized quickly that the person sitting in my passenger seat was a man dressed in black clothing with a gun pointed at my body. (Just a quick side note I’m with family in Colorado now writing this out now. I’ve been anxious to write about it because writing is how I process things. I’ve always journaled and written to process my thoughts, so I guess that’s exactly what this is because I can’t quite put this all into words any other way. Bear with me in case I overshare :)) The man took my phone out of my hands and told me to drive with both hands on the wheel. I pulled out of the neighborhood as he told me to go to the nearest ATM. I wasn’t familiar with the area so he pulled up a GPS on his phone and started telling me where to turn. Unlocking my phone, he asked me for my Apple ID password and (of course) I couldn’t remember it. (You’d think that with a gun pointed at you you’d remember every password you’ve ever had but yeah…nope.) After telling him I couldn’t remember it, the man got very angry. The next thing I know, he put the gun to my head saying “maybe with force, you’ll remember it. If you don’t do what I say I will pull this trigger, I’ve killed before so ending your life would be easy for me”. I was in complete shock. I started praying but the only thing that was repeating over and over and over and over again in my head was “Jesus, help me.” At this point, it was about 3:30pm - we were right in the middle of downtown and traffic was getting heavy. As we pulled up to the West End area, there was a Wells Fargo on the right where he told me to pull in. He pulled his ski mask over his face and got low in the car with the silver gun at my stomach. There were 2 police cars parked in the parking lot of the gas station a few hundred feet away, and this must have spooked him because as I pulled up to the ATM he told me not to stop and to keep driving through it and back onto the main road. At that point he kept saying over and over that he was “on a mission” and needed $900 by 4pm and if I didn’t have it in time, he’d shoot me. He was angry again and threatened to hit me if I didn’t hurry up so I kept driving. As we stopped beside other cars he told me to pretend I was on my phone so nobody would get suspicious. We were at a red light when he put the gun down and started looking through my car and my laptop for valuables. All I could think about was that if I ran in that moment, I wouldn’t get out in time before he reached for his gun. He started asking personal questions like “how old are you? Are you a student? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you do drugs?” Every now and then he’d ask me “Are you ok?…Ok, good”. We drove for a few more blocks and pulled into the drive through ATM of the First Tennessee bank on 30th and West End. Something in me told me to pull up far enough from the machine so that I could step out of my car completely just to reach it. I did, I opened the door but only half of my body was out of the car. He gripped my hoodie with one hand reaching over the seat, and the other hand was holding the gun at my side. I started pressing buttons on the ATM terrified out of my mind praying for wisdom. Praying for a still small voice. Scenarios of things that could happen if I got back into my car started running through my head. What felt like the shortest but longest few seconds standing at the ATM made the man angry so he told me to get back into the car and continue driving. I did. I didn’t take the money out, and somehow as we were driving away I convinced him to let me turn around and try again. It was almost 4pm and the gun was pointed at my head again as I pulled into the bank for the second time. This time there WAS a still small voice telling me to park even further so that when I pulled up I could open the door and get my entire body out of the car to reach for the machine. I don’t know what happened then. I really don’t. I wish I could explain every little thought in my brain exactly how it happened but I can’t. It’s like for a second I was not in control of my body. I pulled away and he pulled the trigger. I couldn’t hear anything except a loud ringing in my brain, I smelled a fired gun and my body felt absolutely nothing except for the man’s hand still gripped on my hoodie for what felt like the longest few seconds ever. I started taking the hoodie off, but I felt him let go and I ran around the building inside the bank. There was nobody in the bank except for a few female tellers behind the desk. I ran to the back of the bank asking for a phone to call my brother Ruslan. Long story short, after some blood and my first time in an ambulance and getting needles in my body, I got to the hospital. This next part is for all my fellow Grey’s Anatomy fans: