EXCITING NEWS: TNG WhatsApp Channel is LIVE…
Subscribe for FREE to get LIVE NEWS UPDATE. Click here to subscribe!
A Colombian woman, identified as Angelica Gaitan, who went missing two years ago has been found alive floating in the ocean.
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports the 46-year-old woman was found alive floating in the ocean by fisherman Rolando Visbal and his friend.
She was found around two kilometres away from the shore of Puerto Colombia at around 6 AM local time on Saturday.
A video of the rescue shared by Visbal on Facebook that has since gone viral on social media shows the fisherman and his friend manoeuvering their boat toward an unresponsive Gaitan.
According to the New York Post, they mistook her for a piece of driftwood until she raised her hand to signal for help.
Visbal and his friend could be seen in the video pulling Gaitan into the boat. She was exhausted and suffering from hypothermia after staying afloat for more than eight hours.
Her first words after she was rescued were reportedly, “I was born again, God did not want me to die”.
When Gaitan was identified, her backstory revealed that she suffered years of domestic abuse at the hands of her ex-husband and decided to run away in 2018.
“For 20 years I had a toxic relationship. The abuse began during the first pregnancy. He beat me, he violently abused me. In the second pregnancy, the abuse continued and I could not get away from him because the girls were small,” she told RCN Radio.
She further narrated that the police complaints did not help, as cops would detain her husband for 24 hours before letting him go. He would then return and the assaults would continue.
In September 2018, she said, her husband broke her face and tried to kill her. Unable to endure the abuse, she ran away from home and wandered the streets for six months before finding a place to stay at the Camino de Fe rescue centre.
However, police asked her to leave the shelter when her ex-husband moved cities, which meant that protective measures granted to her came to an end.
“I did not want to continue with my life. I wanted to end everything, I had no help from anywhere not even from my family, because this man kept me away from my social circle, that’s why I didn’t want to continue living,” Gaitan said.
She said she decided to “jump into the sea” but does not remember anything after that as she slipped into unconsciousness.
“The man who rescued me in the middle of the sea told me that I was unconscious, floating,” she said.
Meanwhile, local media has tracked down Gaitan’s daughter, Alejandra Castiblanco, who said she did not know of her mother’s whereabouts for the last two years. She also suggested that reports of domestic abuse were false.
Castiblanco and her sister are now raising money to bring their mother to the capital Bogota where she can be “taken care of by family”.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFzbG-FF0on/