It was another regular Sunday for self-employed vendor Morgan Nelson, 70, as he mingled with familiar faces outside his Grazettes, St Michael home.
Neighbours went about their daily shores and Nelson stood outside his house with the sun beating down while he met the man who would often come by and wash his van which transports his natural juice drinks to the spot from where he has been selling for years on the edge of the PSV stand at Cheapside in The City.
Then, the unexpected happened. A young man, said to be in his early 20s, walked up to him and stabbed him in the chest. Just like that.
His story of survival, Nelson insists, has to be divine intervention and nothing short of a miracle.
“It happened that I was outside my door, along side my van. While I was there talking to the gentleman that was washing my van, I saw this man come. I was not looking for anything to happen like that [stabbing] ‘cause I wasn’t studying anything so,” Nelson told Barbados TODAY in an interview at his home on Tuesday.
“And he just came up to me, and push a knife in me. When he pushed the knife in me, I bend over and held the blade of the knife, because he was trying to push the knife further in me. I forced against his hand, and knife slipped out from inside my chest. He hold the knife and running at me as I ran and scaled two nearby fences of neigbouring houses to get away from him.”
The stabbing victim spoke with a sense of calmness and in high spirits, belying the fact that hours before he was at death’s door.
Estimating the two wire fences to be between five and six feet high, the businessman said he had no hope of escaping over them from his attacker, on his own abilities, especially at his age and having lost lots of blood by this time.
“It is God that was working in me,” he said. “It was God’s plan. Without God, I couldn’t have made it. It was in God’s plan.”
Nelson points to the two fences he scaled to flee his attacker. (EJ)
Once Nelson had conquered the fences, he hid behind nearby bushes on the property of a neighbour, and looking through the shrubbery, he could see the attacker turning on the man who was washing his vehicle.
“When I peeped through the bush, I could see him beating the car wash man with a shovel as he struggled on the ground. At first, he stabbed the man; and when he stabbed the man, the knife broke off inside the man.
“So, that is when I took up the shovel, and started pounding the man with it; jucking him with it, and also stamped up on the man. All that I saw when I was peeping through the bushes.”
Nelson said: “I could not go and help the man because I was bleeding and lost a lot of blood. The first person that came to my rescue was a lady who is a nurse.
“When I came out from the bush, she put cotton wool down through the wound and took me to the hospital in her van. But we first went to the police station, and the police escorted us to the hospital.”
He also remembered the nurse’s arrival on the scene with her car had caused the attacker to flee when she drove her vehicle directly at him during his escapade.
The victim said he later found out that his assailant had fatally stabbed another man only hours before.
He also related an interaction he had with the doctor at the hospital that, according to him, reinforced his strong belief that God had allowed him to survive the violent attack for a higher purpose in life.
“The doctor told me, it is some mystery for a man of my age to get through this thing. The doctor also told me, if the knife had penetrated a little more, I would be a dead man.”
During our interview, he had calls and visits from well-wishers, only part of numerous others since news of the almost tragic incident occurred.
He has taken a few days break from work to recuperate, while one of his employees continues to keep the drink sales going at Cheapside.
The post ‘It’s a miracle’: Vendor recounts stabbing ordeal appeared first on Barbados Today.
