there s not much runway. it s a lot of rock and brush. chris handly, a 15-year-old belt on local, is one of the teens. if you jump properly, you have no problems, you don t hit the bottom and bounce back up. and keep having fun. but if the jump falls short you land in water that s about this deep with jagged big rocks underneath. as the boys take turns launching themselves off the cliff and into the water below, a crowd begins to gather. i kind of felt obligated to do something, like put on for the party or whatever. so chris decides to take it up a notch. the plan was for chris jump, he was going to set this bush on fire. he was going to jump over it. so the insanity level of this jump was up there, for sure. you can t even see it. pour the lighter fluid. hell yeah!
aaron strunk doesn t think twice. he jumps in after chris. as soon as i surfaced, i saw him floating there. he was like a bobber on a fishing line. chris body quickly begins to sink beneath the surface. we thought he might have just been passed out at first. that s when we started seeing the blood emerge. that s when things got real serious. call 911! luckily one of the boats of onlookers happen to be a group of army medics from fort hood. they immediately jump into action and swim toward chris. as the medics try and stabilize chris, his friends are panicked. they fear they may have just filmed their friend s death. call 911 right now! one of the first things that popped in my head was he could very easily be dead.
from a dare. it finally gets lit. yes! go! i felt rushed because the fire was going out fast. we used everything we had to make the fire. chris rushes to pull down his shorts before the dying fire goes out. but as he runs for the cliff, his friends can see that his swimming trunks never come completely off. as soon as i saw his shorts get caught, i instantly knew something bad was going to happen. chris trips just before the jump and falls 20 feet over the cliff s edge. he didn t jump out at all. his forward momentum pulled his body through the flaming bush and head-first down so the back of his head hits on the rocks. oh! someone go down there. he disappeared over the edge. all of a sudden you hear a smack against the water. people started freaking out. oh [ bleep ].
as chris tries to light the bush on fire, cameras roll from above and below. jay jones is one of the teens filming. i was in between the bush and chris on top of the cliff filming. i guess mainly the only thing i was worried about was getting the bush lit on fire. i ve seen chris jump over that bush before. you can hear jay shouting to make the fire bigger. that s not enough. first we tried lighter fluid. and it wasn t making a dramatic enough effect on the bush. so then it turned to the gas. now you got to light it again. we struggle for awhile to get it lit. just before chris is about to jump, spectators on a boat offer up another challenge. somebody dared me to do it naked. so it just went to another level. chris is the kind of guy, i ve never seen him back down
he could have very easily broken his neck from the fall and could be dead. we might have just seen our friend die. chris handly makes it to the hospital. and after five hours of brain surgery, he emerges alive. had a subdural and epidural hematoma. both the outside and inside of my brain were bleeding which was causing intracranial pressure. the doctors said i was really, really, really close to the point of not being able to come back. while chris may have eluded permanent physical injury, he and his friends are scarred by the memory of that day. it s a lesson they will never forget. the fact we caught a near-death experience on camera really, really reminds chris and all of us all the time that it can happen like that. and you re gone. and you re never coming back. so that alters some of the choices we make in life.