‘I WALKED AWAY FROM DEATH’
Just after midnight on Sep. 19, 2008, Barker and his close friend and musical partner Adam Goldstein were two of six passengers who boarded the 11-seater Learjet bound for Los Angeles from Columbia, South Carolina. During an aborted take-off, the plane skidded off the runway, broke through a fence and burst into flames before slamming into a highway embankment.
“When I jumped through the emergency exit when the plane blew up, I was in such a hurry to exit the plane I jumped right into the jet, which is full of fuel,” Barker explained in a 2019 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. “My whole body lit up.” He almost lost his foot and would spend four months in hospital. “In about 11 of my 30 surgeries in the burns centre, I woke up,” Barker told Rogan. “They just couldn’t give me enough medication to knock me out because I’d been self-medicating for so long and abusing meds for so long. I’d just wake up in the middle of anaesthesia.”
After recovering, he committed to his sobriety and a healthy vegan lifestyle. “Every day since the plane crash is another day I walked away from death,” he says.