Abducted Kennewick grandmother: ‘The only thing I thought was, “They are going to kill me” ’

Hazel Abel waited for a while Friday before cautiously cracking her front door just enough to peer out and see who was standing on her porch.

Four days earlier, the 86-year-old Kennewick woman answered the door for a stranger. In seconds she was bound, gagged, stuffed into the trunk of her own car and whisked away into the night.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t trust anybody now.”

Hours after she answered a knock at the door of her West Skagit Avenue home on Monday, she escaped from the trunk at a Walmart store near Portland.

Three Kennewick teens — Dyllan Martin, 16, Billy Underwood, 15, and a 14-year-old girl — were arrested in connection with the case. Martin is Abel’s great-grandson, and he allegedly targeted Abel for her car because the teens planned to run away to Oregon, court documents said.

Court documents show the teens discussed killing Abel and burning her body.

“It scared me. You just can’t think of somebody doing that,” she said. “Killing me is one thing, but what they were (allegedly) going to do, oh my. I couldn’t imagine Dyllan doing something like that.”

Abel remembers opening her door about 8 p.m. and something hitting her in the face. Her hands were taped together, her face was covered with an apron so she couldn’t see, and a gag was shoved into her mouth.

She said she had no clue who was kidnapping her.

“The only thing I thought was, ‘They are going to kill me,’ ” she said.

Despite being disorientated and frightened, Abel couldn’t help but think about her dog and whether the intruders would hurt Tessa, she said. She repeatedly asked them not to hurt her dog.

Before the car took off, Abel felt a dog bed next to her, and soon Tessa was by her side.

“She stayed real close to me,” she said.

Abel said deputies told her she was in the dark trunk for about six hours. The only time she could see was when the driver hit the brakes. Even though Abel’s face was covered, she didn’t have trouble breathing.

Abel remembers the car stopping once for gas, and at one point hearing what sounded like gravel crunching under the tires. Other than occasional talking and sounds from the radio, the trip was mostly quiet.

“They played some really crappy music,” she said.

The car finally came to a stop for a period of time and Abel managed to free herself, she said. She worried that her kidnappers would open the trunk and catch her, but she decided it was worth the risk.

After some maneuvering, she freed her hands, removed the cover from her face and took out the gag, she said. She said she was surprised at how easy it was to get free.

“(The kidnappers) weren’t very good,” she said. “They didn’t go to Boy Scouts.”

Next came the challenge of figuring out how to pop the trunk in the pitch black. Abel began feeling around inside the trunk, running her hands along the sides and top until she came across what felt like a cord. She pulled on it and the trunk popped open.

Abel — who is under 5 feet tall and doesn’t move well — managed to haul herself out of the trunk. She looked around, noticed she was near the garden department of a Walmart and scanned the area for help.

“I saw a man and woman in (the store),” Abel said. “I hollered and told them I had been kidnapped.”

Once inside the store, Abel felt safe for the first time in hours. Employees gave her new clothes, food and water. The police then showed up and Abel soon was looking at photos of the three suspects captured on Walmart security cameras.

Although Abel didn’t know it at the time, the teens were reportedly in the store when she escaped, court documents said. The 14-year-old girl, whose name was not released, told a detective the teens ran from the store after seeing Abel standing with an employee. They were arrested a few hours later at a nearby gas station.

The teens apparently had stopped at the Walmart to buy toiletries. Abel told the Herald they may have used $50 from her purse to buy the items.

When Abel reviewed the security camera photos, she didn’t recognize her great-grandson, she said. It was some time before she found out Dyllan was involved.

“I cried," Abel said. "I was terribly upset.”

Abel has spent the days since her kidnapping wondering why she was taken from her home and driven to Oregon. She suspects she became the target of the kidnapping plot because she had a car and had given Dyllan money in the past.

As Abel tried to make sense of why she was abducted, her world was again turned upside down when she opened the Tri-City Herald on Friday morning and read the headline, “Kennewick teens planned grisly death,” she said. That’s when Abel learned about the plan to kill her and burn her body in the car, she said.

Another thing that sends chills down Abel’s spine is the butcher knife she says was taken from her home during the abduction.

Abel, a widow who has lived in Kennewick since the 1950s, is trying to return to her life before the attack, she said. She hasn’t given much thought as to what should happen to her great-grandson, though she believes if he is guilty he needs to be punished.

For now, Abel is just thankful she and Tessa are alive.

“Some have told me the good Lord was looking after me,” she said.

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 6:57 PM with the headline "Abducted Kennewick grandmother: ‘The only thing I thought was, “They are going to kill me” ’."