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SOMETIMES, in the midst of disaster, miracles happen.
Just moments after taking off, Air India Flight AI171, bound for Gatwick, came plummeting to the ground in a terrifying fireball killing all on board – save one lone survivor.
Vishwash Ramesh is the lone survivor of the devastating Air India crash that happened yesterday[/caption]
The flight, bound for the UK, came crashing down into buildings shortly after take-off[/caption]
It was initially thought all 242 on board had been killed[/caption]
Astonishing footage showed Brit Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, who sat in seat 11A, walking away from the crash before rescue workers greeted him in astonishment.
He was even able to produce his boarding pass before being whisked off to hospital, where he is being treated for minor injuries to his chest, eyes, and feet.
Given the scale of disaster when plane crashes happen, it is very rare only one person makes it out alive.
There are only a handful of people who can say they were lucky enough to be the sole survivor.
But many are left with scars – both physical and mental – traumatised by memories of plummeting from the sky, and haunted by the sudden loss of their family members.
Speaking to the media shortly after his miraculous survival was confirmed, Vishwash said: “Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed.
“It all happened so quickly. When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. “
Dr Marianne Trent, clinical psychologist and author of the Grief Collection, said Vishwash is likely to suffer from survivors guilt.
She said: “There’s no real sense why that should have been the one seat where the sole survivor sat.
“People often swap seats on planes and he might have a sense of ‘why me?’”
Vishwash isn’t the only person to have walked away from a plane crash, losing family members in the process.
At just four years old, Cecelia Crocker became the sole survivor when Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just moments after taking off from Detroit, in 1987.
The other 154 people on board were killed, as were two people on the ground.
But Cecelia Crocker survived – becoming known as “America’s Orphan”.
“I think about the accident every day,” said Crocker, now 42.
“It’s kind of hard not to think about it when I look in the mirror. I have visual scars, my arms and my legs and I have scars on my forehead.”
It is believed Cecelia’s mum shielded her during the crash[/caption]
Cecelia in the hospital as a four-year-old after the crash[/caption]
Though Cecelia doesn’t remember the incident herself, her mum, dad, and six-year-old brother David were all killed.
It is believed that Cecelia’s mum, Paula, shielded her.
“When I realised I was the only person to survive that plane crash, I was maybe in middle school, high school maybe,” Crocker said.
“Being an adolescent and confused, so it was just extra stress for me. I remember feeling angry and survivor’s guilt. Why didn’t my brother survive? Why didn’t anybody? Why me?”
Dr Trent added that these feelings can linger on for years and affect every aspect of their lives.
“You might not feel worthy of people’s good thoughts and sympathy because you’re not the one who died,” she said.
There’s a black hole between the moment when I was seated in the plane and the moment I found myself in the water
Bahia Bakari
“People with survivor’s guilt withdraw into themselves, their world becomes smaller, there’s an impact on their functioning, their ability to get things done.”
Back in 2009, a Yemenia Airways flight plummeted into the Indian Ocean with its engines at full throttle.
All 152 on board were killed – except 12-year-old Bahia Bakari, who was on the way to her grandfather’s wedding.
She was left drifting in the water for hours with “the taste of jet fuel” in her mouth, and only a piece of debris to cling on to.
Speaking to a French court, she recalled the moment things started to go wrong.
“I started to feel the turbulence but nobody was reacting much, so I told myself it must be normal,” said Bahia.
“I felt something like an electric shock go through my body. There’s a black hole between the moment when I was seated in the plane and the moment I found myself in the water.”
Bahia Bakari miraculously survived by clinging onto wreckage when she was aged just 12[/caption]
The Yemenia Airways flight plummeted into the Indian Ocean[/caption]
Bahia spoke out about her experience for the first time in a French courtroom[/caption]
She remembers trying to climb up on to the wreckage, but lacked the strength to do so in the choppy waters.
It was only in the hospital that she was told she was the lone survivor.
Others who survived found themselves not in the water but in thick jungle – yet just as far from civilisation as anyone stuck in the ocean.
Juliane Koepcke was flying over the Peruvian rainforest with her mother in 1971 when her plane was struck by lightning.
Aged just 17, she survived not only a two-mile fall to the ground but a ten day trek through the Amazon.
After flying into a dark cloud, her plane became engulfed by lightning, she recalled.
I was in freefall. I could see the canopy of the jungle spinning towards me
Juliane Koepcke
“My mother and I held hands but we were unable to speak. Other passengers began to cry and weep and scream,” she told the BBC.
“My mother said very calmly: ‘That is the end, it’s all over’. Those were the last words I ever heard from her.
“The plane jumped down and went into a nose-dive,” added Juliane.
“It was pitch black and people were screaming, then the deep roaring of the engines filled my head completely.
“Suddenly the noise stopped and I was outside the plane. I was in freefall. I could see the canopy of the jungle spinning towards me.”
Alone with a broken collarbone and deep cuts to her legs, and wearing only a short, sleeveless mini-dress and white sandals, she began to walk.
Annette Herfkens spent eight days in the Vietnamese jungle after her plane hit a mountain ridge[/caption]
Jim Polehinke was the only survivor of the 2006 Comair crash – in which he was co-pilot[/caption]
Only a small bag of sweets kept her from total starvation.
Initially thinking she was hallucinating, Juliane came across a boat and a hut where she spent the night, pulling maggots out of a wound in her upper arm, before finally a group of men found her the next day and took her back to civilisation.
Juliane’s story has parallels to that of Annette Herfkens, who, aged 31, spent eight days in the Vietnamese jungle by herself awaiting rescue.
After Vietnam Airlines flight 474 dropped from the sky in 1992, killing the other 30 people on board, Annette was left with twelve broken bones, her jaw hanging off and a collapsed lung.
THOUGH lucky to be alive, Brit Vishwash Kumar Ramesh may struggle with the mental impact of yesterday’s Air India crash for decades, Dr Marianne Trent, clinical psychologist, told The Sun.
“Post trauma people often struggle to sleep, have intrusive thoughts and there will be triggers such as noises and smells of the fire, the smoke, booking future holidays,” she said.
“All those stories of the people he met along the way, or maybe those he didn’t take the time to talk to, will be replaying in his mind. He will be second guessing everything he did.”
Dr Trent said he may even feel guilt that he walked away with minor injuries.
She said: “He may just feel grateful to survive and have walked away but it’s very strange that only one person survived.
“We need to allow him to feel what he’s feeling. Survivors of fatal car crashes who escaped with minor injuries might wish they’d broken a leg or had something physical to show for their life changing experience.
“They might ask ‘why don’t I look different.. How can I look like the same person?’ It’s harder for people to empathise if you look the same way too.”
Dr Trent added that memories of his brother might be forever entwined with the horror of the crash.
“His experience will be overlapped by grief and trauma.
“Usually if you think of a brother there are thoughts about songs you might have heard growing up together, or things you did, nice memories.
“But when someone dies the whole relationship changes and those thoughts can make you feel really awful and send you right down into the depths again.
“The fact this is all being played out on an international stage will also be extremely hard for him and he will need a lot of psychological help to come to terms with what has happened.”
Her plane had crashed into a mountain ridge and she now lay surrounded by the ripped-apart fuselage, with a dead stranger across her.
“That’s where you have fight or flight – I definitely chose flight,” she told the Guardian.
“I stayed in the moment. I trusted that they were going to find me. I didn’t think, ‘What if a tiger comes?’ I thought, ‘I’ll deal with it when the tiger comes.’ I didn’t think, ‘What if I die?’ I thought, ‘I will see about it when I die.’”
Crawling along by her elbows, she managed to capture water with parts of the plane’s insulation until a rescue party carried her down in a hammock.
In all these cases, only one passenger made it out alive.
But when the plane’s pilot is the sole person spared death, the feelings of survivor’s guilt can be even worse.
The bad voice says, ‘No, stay here, have another shot of liquor’
Jim Polehinke
Jim Polehinke was co-pilot aboard Com Air flight 5191, which crashed seconds after takeoff from Lexington, Kentucky in 2006.
“I’ve cried harder than any man has ever cried, or any man should be able to cry,” he said.
“My wife was there to support me to where I could just put my head on her shoulder and cry.
“It’s that constant struggle where my inner voice wants to keep going forward.
“The good voice says, ‘Yeah, come on, you have the inner strength to do that,’ but the bad voice says, ‘No, stay here, have another shot of liquor.’”
Dr Trent also highlighted how harmful behaviours can become a crutch for people to deal with survivor’s guilt.
She said: “Sometimes people become a risk to themselves through non intentional self injury, drinking too much, not showing and looking after themselves, taking recreational drugs to cope.”
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SITTING down for a tense dinner as her dad skulked out of sight, Jamie-Lee Arrow had a sickening feeling in her gut.
It was a mood shared by her stepmother, Helle Christensen, who uttered a chilling prophecy as they began to eat.
Jamie-Lee Arrow has struggled to come to terms with her father’s monstrous crimes[/caption]
The Satan-obsessed killer is now behind bars[/caption]
She said: “Enjoy your meal because this is the last time I will cook for you… because Isakin is going to kill me.”
A day later, on the evening of November 12, 2010, Isakin Jonsson, 32, picked up a knife and climbed on to the bed where his girlfriend was resting.
He slit her throat, decapitated her, and cut pieces of flesh from her arms and legs, which he cooked in salt and homegrown cannabis leaves.
The depraved crime sent shockwaves through the sleepy town of Skara, Sweden, but for Jonsson’s daughter, Jamie-Lee Arrow, who was nine at the time, this came as no surprise.
In the build-up to Helle’s haunting prophecy, the 40-year-old – who had five children with previous partners – had been fighting with Isakin for over 24 hours while Jamie-Lee and two of her children were staying.
Jamie-Lee tells The Sun: “They were throwing plates, pushing each other, throwing knives, and me and her two other children were just sitting on the sofa, crying like babies.
“So at that time, during those 24 hours, I was certain that either I would get killed or she would.”
After the vicious murder, Jonsson came forward to the police and confessed. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to forensic psychiatric care in March 2011.
Looking back on Jamie-Lee’s earliest memories of her dad, she reflects it was little surprise that things ended in unimaginable violence.
She said: “Walking into my dad’s flat was like walking into a horror movie.
“Pictures from Friday the 13th and Freddy Krueger. Everything was just dark and misery.”
Jamie-Lee’s parents separated when she was a toddler, in the early 2000s, leading her to spend her childhood split between two worlds, her mum’s and her dad’s.
She tells us: “I was experiencing light and dark, and even though everything was normal at my mum’s, I didn’t feel normal because I was carrying dark secrets about what was going on at my dad’s.”
Those ‘dark secrets’ came from Jonsson’s morbid fascination with the occult, an obsession that he often tried to force on to his young daughter.
She said: “He often talked about the devil, demons and evil spirits, and when I was little he liked to introduce me to the other side.
“We would lay in the dark on the bed and he would go, ‘Do you see the faces on the wall, can you see them?’
“Then he would say it so much I would actually start seeing them.”
She confronted her father in a recent documentary[/caption]
He gave Jamie-Lee a Satanic bible at the age of 11, but his warped worldview corrupted even the most basic of parental responsibilities.
When Jamie-Lee was around eight, she told her dad about her problems with bullies at school.
Instead of offering some warm words and a cup of hot chocolate, he gave her a hand-made voodoo doll and a pin.
It was around this time that Jamie-Lee met her dad’s new girlfriend, Helle, who he met at a psychiatric hospital after he was admitted following a drug overdose.
On meeting Helle, Jamie-Lee said: “I immediately fell in love with her, I thought she was so beautiful.
“She was a very unique person and wasn’t afraid of my dad. I was used to girls being very careful around my dad.
“They didn’t dare to do or say much, but she was joking on his behalf and she was so funny.”
Jamie-Lee and Helle became very close over the years as their relationship turned into that of a mother and daughter.
Jamie-Lee said: “She even told me, you are like my daughter, I love you like a daughter.
“And I really loved her like my mum.”
Jamie-Lee has turned her trauma into a positive force for good[/caption]
But it didn’t take long for Jamie-Lee to notice the cracks in Jonsson and Helle’s newfound relationship.
She said: “They could have very few moments where they seemed very loving, where they were laughing and having a good time.
“And all I wanted was for them to be happy together and to always be together.
“I had a book where I had written that my biggest wish in life is that they’d stay together for the rest of my life.
“But then most of the time they were fighting and they were not good for each other.”
Those fights culminated in the violent 24-hour argument shortly before Helle’s brutal murder, and her chilling final words to the girl she loved like a daughter.
It was her mum who told her about what happened the night after. She sat her down on the bed and said she had something horrible to tell her.
Jamie-Lee recalls: “I was like ‘No, no don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ and I was just trying to run out the bedroom just to not hear it.
“Then she said, ‘Helle’s dead’ and my first reaction was, ‘Was it Dad?’
Jamie-Lee has gained thousands of Instagram fans inspired by her defiant response to her traumatic upbringing[/caption]
“And then we just sat crying and screaming, it was awful.
“I felt like I had lost both his girlfriend and I had lost him and I felt something inside of me broke.”
The ordeal had a traumatic effect on the nine-year-old, with Jamie-Lee going on to struggle with depression and addiction.
“I got into drinking at a very early age,” she said.
“I finally had found something that soothed my anxiety and my hatred for myself, I could finally escape reality and it was amazing and I didn’t want it to stop.
“It went from drinking to smoking weed to all different kinds of drugs, anything I could get my hands on I would take.
“I knew I could fall asleep and not wake up again, but I didn’t care.”
Despite dreams of becoming a doctor prior to the murder, Jamie-Lee’s school attendance tanked as she sank further into addiction, dropping out completely at just 15.
During these dark days, Jamie-Lee still visited her father in hospital, who brainwashed her into thinking that he was the only one who cared about her.
But he had not changed, as the then 17-year-old was about to find out.
“I was in a really, really bad state and I was seconds away from killing myself and I said to my dad, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m going to kill myself if something doesn’t change’,” said Jamie-Lee.
“He said, ‘The only way out is to do this’, and he told me about a ritual that had came to him when he was lying in his bed, he said it was a blessing to him.
“We sat down, in front of each other, and he told me to hold his hands and he wanted me to say after him.
Jamie-Lee still cannot bear to utter the words her father told her to say that day, but explains he tried to sell her soul to the devil.
She said: “I felt, like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ It felt so wrong.
“I just got such a bad feeling in my body, and I was in such a bad state that I felt like I was going insane.
“Like I had lost it, I had lost touch with reality.”
Walking into my dad’s flat was like walking into a horror movie. Pictures from Friday the 13th and Freddy Krueger. Everything was just dark and misery
On another visit, Jonsson walked his horrified daughter through the murder, in shocking detail.
“He told me with such passion, and that scared me, it was so disturbing,” she said.
But the final straw was when Jamie-Lee decided to confront her dad about something she wanted an apology for.
When he responded violently, she decided to provoke him, to see if he was capable of doing the same thing to her as he did his former girlfriend.
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She said: “He looked at me with black eyes, like he had no love for me at all.
“He said, ‘If you don’t stop now, you’ll see what I can do’.”
That was the last time Jamie-Lee saw her dad until she confronted him as part of Investigation Discovery’s recent true-crime series Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks.
When asked why she wanted to see her dad again, she said: “For years I had been wondering about my dad, what he’s doing, what he looks like, where he is mentally.
“It just couldn’t leave my mind so I knew that I did want to see him one last time just to ask the questions I was carrying and to get closure.
“I got to say goodbye to him and I got confirmation that he could never, ever in a million years be a part of my life.”
Now 23, Jamie-Lee is happily engaged to her boyfriend of five years and the mother of two beautiful children, a three-year-old boy and a nine-month-old daughter, and is now able to move forward with her new life.
Her Instagram has attracted over 30,000 followers in the last month, attracting an audience that is fascinated by her defiant response to her tragic upbringing.
She now works as a public speaker and author, teaching people how to turn their trauma into something positive.
Her advice?
“Just because your childhood sucked doesn’t mean your entire life has to,” she said.
“We have the power over our own lives and we can create something beautiful even if we came from something ugly.”