After Being Abducted, 2 California Teens Joined Forces to Escape Their Captor: ‘We Never Cried’

Tamara Brooks, 16, and Jacqueline “Jacque” Marris, 17, had never crossed paths before the night that changed their lives forever. By dawn, the two high school students were linked by an ordeal so terrifying that it forged a lifelong connection.

On the night of Aug. 1, 2002, Brooks had driven with her friend Eric Brown, 18, to Quartz Hill, California, about an hour north of Los Angeles. What began as a routine late-night outing quickly turned into a nightmare when a stolen gray Saturn pulled up beside them. Behind the wheel was 37-year-old Roy Ratliff — a career criminal already wanted on a rape charge.

Brooks initially mistook Ratliff for a police officer, until she spotted the gun. “He said, ‘Give me all your money,’” she recalled. “I was terrified. I was shaking. I was trying to appear calm, but I had the biggest lump in my throat.” Brown kept repeating, “I don’t want to die,” while Brooks silently prayed to survive.

Ratliff forced Brown from the vehicle, binding him with duct tape before returning to restrain Brooks. Meanwhile, just moments away, Marris and her friend Frank Melero, 19, were parked nearby — unaware that their lives were about to collide with Brooks’.

Melero described the moment Ratliff approached him. “He stuck the gun in my face and told me to throw out my wallet,” he said. Ratliff took his cash, demanded rope, and kept a weapon pressed into Melero’s back as he retrieved it. When a state worker briefly pulled up, Ratliff warned Melero not to move or speak. After the worker left, Ratliff forced Melero out and sped away — now holding both Brooks and Marris captive inside Brown’s stolen Ford Bronco.

Melero later managed to free himself and alert his mother, who called 911. Police soon reached the scene and freed Brown, who described the stolen Bronco and helped initiate a search.

Inside the Bronco, Brooks and Marris immediately began forming an alliance. “Right at the start, the bonding began. I knew I wasn’t alone,” Marris said. Brooks agreed: “We never cried once during those hours — only when we knew we were safe.”

Bound with duct tape and unable to speak, the two started drawing letters on each other’s hands to communicate. “The first thing we wrote was: ‘What shall we do?’ Then we began to make a plan,” Marris explained.

Brooks remembered that Brown kept a Bowie knife in the car and hoped they could reach it. At one point, Ratliff fell asleep, fueling their urgency. “You could see the pulse in his throat,” Brooks said. “I hoped I wouldn’t go to hell for killing him.”

When the Bronco stopped, the teenagers acted. Marris found the knife and stabbed Ratliff while Brooks struck him with a bottle. They pushed him from the vehicle — but he recovered, wounded and furious.

Ratliff demanded to be let back inside, firing a warning shot. “He told us he’d have to shoot one of us because he couldn’t handle us both,” Marris said. “We told him no — we’re sticking together.”

Hours later, someone spotted the Bronco nearly 100 miles north of Quartz Hill. Authorities surrounded the vehicle. In the chaos that followed, shots were fired. Marris recalled Ratliff climbing over the seat toward her. “He had his head on my shoulder. I was waving to the shooter to tell him we were in there too.”

Though initially using them as hostages, Ratliff showed a final, strange shift in tone. “He looked me in the eye with such despair,” Marris said. “It was like he was telling the cops, ‘Don’t shoot the girls.’ In a crazy way, I think he was protecting us.”

Ratliff was fatally shot after reportedly raising his gun again as officers moved in. Brooks and Marris were finally pulled from the vehicle — alive after a 12-hour nightmare.

“We were really there for each other,” Marris said. “We kept saying, ‘I came here with her, and I’m leaving with her.’”