After 5 days stranded in woods, ‘no giving up’
Spring man, 32, shares story of survival following crash last month
Jose Velazquez remembers the moment he lost hope.
He had been lying in a wooded area in north Harris County for four days with a litany of broken bones and a dead cellphone. His crushed 2007 Honda Accord lay upside down about 10 feet away, but he didn’t remember a crash.
Rain transformed the dirt below his body to mud. For four days in late June, all he could do was squirm toward a light post in the distance — the only visible sign of people — and bang a stick against an aluminum can for help.
Velazquez, 32, of Spring, said the hum of cars also assured him that people were close. But he couldn’t yell for help with a collapsed lung, and by the fourth night, he stopped hearing the traffic.
“That’s when I lost hope,” Velazquez said. “I even said out loud, ‘If you’re going to take me, take me now.’ ”
The next day, rescuers with Texas EquuSearch, along with a band of Velazquez’s family and friends, found him about 50 yards in the woods near FM 1488 and Texas 242 in The Woodlands.
It marked the end of a diligent search effort within Velazquez’
tight-knit family, who had passed around hundreds of flyers around Houston and later tracked the last known location of his cellphone through AT&T.
“They turned into detectives,” Velazquez said. “They figured everything out. I firmly believe that if it wasn’t for my family, I wouldn’t be here today.”
The crash
The last thing Velazquez said he remembers before the crash was eating dinner with his fiancée late June 25 at AGU Ramen off Washington Avenue near downtown Houston. He was off work that day and decided to meet her for a late-night meal, he said.
According to Houston police, Velazquez’s fiancée said they also were drinking at the Little Dipper at 304 Main Street that night.
She asked him not to drive, according to her report, but he left anyway around 1 a.m., police said. Velazquez woke up that morning under a canopy of trees next to his wrecked Honda.
Velazquez said he doesn’t remember drinking, but he wants his crash to serve as an example for others.
“If that was the reason the whole thing happened, then somebody could learn from my experience ... that would mean the world,” he said.
When he woke, Velazquez said he didn’t know he broke his femur, the ribs on the right side of his body and his nose. He also didn’t know about his collapsed lung.
“I just knew that it hurt to move it,” he said. “So I kind of of dragged myself to the car.”
Velazquez tried to stand himself up on the overturned car. For a split second, he stood and spotted a light post and what appeared to be concrete in the distance. He quickly collapsed on his broken leg, but the light gave him a clear goal.
“I knew I had to get there,” he said.
Velazquez, now realizing he couldn’t move, used a stick to pull his dead iPhone from his car. In his mind, inching toward the light post became his only option. Over the two days, he periodically passed out from exhaustion while squirming in that direction.
He could stay awake for only five or six hours at a time, he said.
“I started having these vivid dreams of family members saying they found me, telling me they’re going to get help,” he said.
Velazquez eventually grew worried about dehydration. It started raining on the third day, but the tree canopy prevented the water from hitting his face, he said.
“If (drinking) was the reason the whole thing happened, then somebody could learn from my experience ... that would mean the world.”
Jose Velazquez, spent five days in woods after crash
He again used the stick to rifle through his car and pulled out an umbrella, a Tupperware container and an aluminum Starbucks can, which he used to collect the rain to drink.
“That car was like the giving tree,” he said.
The days felt like a blur with the light post and his family dominating his thoughts.
“I was thinking ‘I cant leave my fiancée,’” he said. “There is no way that’s an option. My little sister, my mom and my dad — they need me. So there was no giving up.”
‘Something in there’
Velazquez grew up in a large family. He said he routinely visits cousins and lives with his parents in Freeport during the week.
The day he went missing, his family thought he might be staying with his parents. Velazquez said he actually planned to visit his cousin who lived off FM 1488.
By 7 p.m. June 26, his family
mobilized in the city, searching parking lots and checking for broken-down cars on the side of the road, said his cousin Ami Jo Velazquez.
She said a few family members stayed out searching until 3 a.m. Thursday. The next day, Ami joined about 20 family members who passed out flyers in downtown and at area businesses.
She said they tried to get EquuSearch involved, but nobody knew where they should focus. Then, on Saturday, Ami accessed Velazquez’s social media accounts, while her sister-inlaw obtained cellphone records from AT&T.
“The phone didn’t die until around 7 a.m. that morning, so it still picked up his location until the phone died,” Ami said.
The family searched neighborhoods around the crash site over the weekend, but a sense of hopelessness grew, she said. Texas EquuSearch eventually joined the effort, and by Sunday, groups of searchers were combing the area.
Another cousin, Yesenia Velazquez, was with the search team that eventually found Velazquez buried in the woods.
“At the angle I saw, I noticed what looked like a white car,” Yesenia said. “Then I said ‘Hey, there’s something in there.’ ”
She said the search leader guided the group of nine people, including four family members, into the woods. They saw what appeared to be Velazquez’s crashed Honda, and the search leader asked the group to get back to the road.
About five minutes passed before a searcher told her he was still alive.
“It felt like forever,” Yesenia said. “All I could do when I got to the side of the road was drop to my knees and just start praying. I was hoping for the best but obviously preparing for the worst.”
‘A new light’
Family members weren’t able to speak to Velazquez until he arrived at the hospital, but he was joking with them the whole time, they said.
Velazquez said he mostly remembers asking the paramedics to drive him to Sonic, because he “was craving Sonic the whole time,” he said.
Velazquez and his cousins say the entire experience brought their already tightknit family closer. He now relies on them to get to his doctor’s appointments, as he’s mostly confined to a wheelchair or a walker.
“Just like any normal family, you’re going to have ups and downs,” Yesenia said. “But we didn’t know how close we were until this. This shined a new light on my family when we put our minds together.”