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From a U.S. hostage in the Colombian jungle, a marriage proposal

While his Colombian girlfriend and twin sons waited, American captive Keith Stansell reached out. He was freed Wednesday.

from the July 3, 2008 edition

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They had been dating for 10 months, when Stansell was kidnapped on Feb. 13, 2003, after the engine in his Cessna aircraft died. The pilot made an emergency landing in a jungle clearing. Stansell was working as a private contractor for a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, and was on some kind of counternarcotics surveillance mission. The FARC is convinced it was a CIA spy flight.

All five crew members survived the crash, but had landed only a few hundred yards from a FARC camp. As they staggered from the plane, the guerrillas ran toward them shouting and firing in the air. They shot the American pilot and a Colombian police officer and took the other three on a forced march through the jungle, according to Perez, the former hostage.

As the plane went down, the pilot, Thomas Janis, had sent out the approximate coordinates of the crash site. Colombian Army helicopters arrived quickly and engaged in a firefight with the guerrillas. The FARC fired at the hostages' feet to make them run faster. They suspected that the Americans might have some kind of tracking device concealed on them, so forced them to march naked through the jungle, says Perez.

Four months later, Jorge Enrique Botero, a Colombian reporter with close contacts with the guerrillas, spent nearly two weeks walking through the jungle to the camp where the Americans were being held to film a "proof-of-life" video. Some of that footage was later shown on CBS's "60 Minutes."

In the interview, Stansell talked about the crash, about his life in the camp, and his opposition to a military rescue. He sent his love to his family in Bradenton, Fla., and to his fiancée in Georgia.

But he did not mention Patricia at all, which made her angry. But not as angry as the fact that Stansell had never told her that he was engaged.

Colombian families can send messages to kidnapped relatives via the radio program "Voices of Kidnapping," which goes out between midnight and 6 a.m. on Sunday.

Every Sunday morning, the hostages would listen. "We all woke up at midnight to listen to the program. It's like a religion," recalls Perez. "Keith's fiancée in Florida stopped sending messages after a while. Keith's parents have improved, but there was a time when they didn't send messages at all, and nor did his children in the US."

Stansell began to suspect that his fiancée in Georgia had left him when he stopped receiving messages from her after about a year. Then, he heard from his father via the radio program that she had married and started a new life.

"At the beginning, he was annoyed with Patricia for getting pregnant," Perez says. "But when he heard about the birth of the twins, he was overjoyed. And that was when he started to change and talk about her more affectionately. He started to feel an immense love for Patricia, for the messages that she sent him, for the way she looked after his children.

"Keith was very moved when he heard his children on the radio, and would talk about them for hours afterwards. We eventually got bored with listening to him," says Perez.

"Patricia is the one who has always been constant," he adds. "She goes on the radio all the time wishing him well. She gets the children to talk to him, and tells him how they are doing at school."

In February, when Perez was told he would be freed, Stansell gave him a message: "Tell Patricia I want to marry her, if she will have me."

Now, Stansell will be able to get his answer directly from Patricia.

 

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