The woman that was in the bed at the time of the earthquake, she managed to get out without injury.
Well, without physical injury, psychologically.
She's still dealing with the shock of that morning two and a half days ago.
And Katie, I trust where you are in New York, you're inside and warm.
That's right, Tom. It is very toasty inside the studio, but outside it is bitter cold.
Mother Nature, of course, hit California hard on Monday, and now she's smacking much of the country with temperatures well below freezing.
Right now, Tom, it is eight degrees here in New York City.
Well, you'll be happy to know out here in Los Angeles, even though they've had the earthquake,
the temperature has been running daytime at about 75 to 80 degrees, and right now it's a pleasant 65 degrees or so.
We'll be back later in now with two exceptional stories about the human spirit in this earthquake.
But Katie, I know that tonight you'll begin with our first story.
That's right, Tom. Up first tonight, we have an unsolved mystery.
The story takes place in Rhode Island. It involves a good-looking young couple, a car chase, a murder, a fast food meal, and a bridge in that order.
Now, of course, this is of nature and the equally strong instinct within human nature to survive.
Every earthquake has an exceptional story of faith and life coming together in hellish circumstances.
Here in California, two strangers met at that intersection. Life prevailed.
KFWB News Time 430. We've experienced what we believe is a very, very strong earthquake to hit the Hollywood area.
What are we going to find? What are we going to do?
We have one man that's under a crushing structure, a crush injury.
He's probably not going to survive. He's being crushed from the pelvic down.
We have to remove about two parking levels of concrete off of him. Then we have to cut his truck out from around him.
His legs are trapped, about mid-fever there.
When firefighters arrived, the scene was grim. It seemed to be hopeless.
Twenty tons of concrete on top of one man.
He was awake, crying, hollering. Kind of stuck my head in a little hole where he was, and I asked his name.
Plain and simple, he said, Salvador. He was screaming. He's in a lot of pain.
He also said to me, he says, hey, in Spanish, he says, ven a orar conmigo, which is come and pray with me.
At that time, I just kind of... excuse me.
Sorry. We understand. If I were trapped somewhere, I'd want you to react the same way, right?
What ran through your mind when you saw that?
At the time, I just thought, wow, you know, there's nothing they can do for this.
Los Angeles City paramedic Ray Lavallee has attempted the impossible before, but he had never seen anything like this.
With 50 other rescuers fighting time and tons of concrete, he promised not to abandon the desperately injured man.
I said, hey, we've got to get this guy out. And everyone was in agreement there.
They said, I don't care if we have to take sledgehammers all day, all week, all month, as long as this guy's alive, we're going to be here and we're going to do it.
Lavallee kept talking with Salvador in Spanish. He knew that he had to keep Salvador's hopes up. If Salvador were to survive, he had to believe.
If I had a spirit to give, I wanted to give him my spirit to keep him going, because if he had been lagging any in spirit, that would have elevated him.
And that was my concern, was that he kept the faith and just did not give up.
He was a fighter, too.
He definitely was. He definitely was. The space that he was in, it couldn't have been more than a foot and a half by two and a half feet, you know, with his legs pinned and the roof of the truck just down all around him, basically.
How far did you have to go down to get next to Salvador?
Probably about six or seven feet, I'd say. It was like...
Very dark.
It was dark. Very narrow and jaggedy, a lot of jagged concrete.
These guys are going to be relieving weight on this side, on the top part of the pancake.
They were removing pieces of concrete, just exactly how we planned to do it, and he was still maintaining good vital signs.
We're going to need the guys in arms for the rectory, chiseling and cutting. They can start getting some of the lumber, and I just want them to stack it right over in that area right there.
You know, you think about this man who was working in the middle of the night, just cleaning your garage, speaks no English.
Right.
He probably thought he would just be dismissed by society in some way, don't you think?
I think that may have been his initial reaction, but we didn't dismiss him. We weren't going to.
But the rescue team was in danger. Aftershocks continued to roll through the area, each shock shifting the rubble.
The rescue team was in as much jeopardy as the trapped man, a man they didn't even know.
How are they going to fall? Are things going to move a certain way, a shift? Anything's possible.
But every time you put your head into that hole or crawled in there, you had to think, Ray, what am I doing here?
I sat past through my mind.
Sure did.
It was extremely dangerous.
It was.
It was.
Late into the morning, hours after the search and rescue team had begun the battle to free Salvador, another team showed up to relieve them.
We all kind of looked at each other and said, no way, no way, we're committed to this. And we stayed on.
We attempted IVs and the way he's contorted in there was not possible. He is on oxygen. And as soon as we can, we'll get those IVs and get him out of here.
Nine grueling, dangerous, exhausting hours after the quake nearly entombed Salvador, the struggle was over.
What was your thought when you saw him coming out of their hole?
It's a miracle. Just that. It's a miracle. Yeah. It's a good feeling. Real good.
Kate.
There's the patient right there.
Hello, Kate.
How did you feel?
Great. Great. It was definitely a great, great ending.
Salvador Pina's condition has been upgraded from critical to serious when reporters visited him this afternoon at the UCLA Medical Center where he's being treated for his injuries. He said through an interpreter that he has faith that he will be fine.
Salvador, of course, was one of the lucky ones. As of tonight, 46 people lost their lives in the quake. 16 of them died at just one apartment complex in Northridge, a place where elderly people and students from the nearby state college and young couples all lived separate lives.
But as now correspondent Dennis Murphy tells us tonight, their worlds collapsed at the same time.
Folks, you're seeing this as it's happening here. Very frightening situation. I've never felt the quake hit the Rebecca area so roughly.
You go to sleep one night and you wake up and 16 people blow, you're dead.
Our house check our bed collapse our dresser fell over onto us on the bed. Everything from everywhere collapse and there was just breaking glass and shattering noise was incredible and incredible and it's not like a bomb went off.
I was asleep and woke up with a joke that was unbelievable and the shaking. It was just a total nightmare that first pile right there where that guy standing right there where my roommate standing.
We looked at each other and thought, we may never see each other again.
They're back up. They knew a decent single bedroom at the Northridge Meadows went for $600 a month, but no one knew the three story apartment complex sat atop a fault line.
Hello, is anybody there. And these neighbors students and retirees barely knew each other. Like any complex, you know you really don't know your neighbors out here.
Tyler a sophomore business student had been asleep in apartment 308. I was just being thrown back and forth, you know onto my back I was trying to grab onto the rail.
It sounded like a train was rolling through the complex.
No one can forget the horrifying moment the Northridge Meadows apartments lurch six feet off its foundation. The top stories pancaking down on the first floor.
The southeast corner of the Meadows was now a two story building.
The next minute you can be planning the rest of your life and the next minute you can be dead.
In less than a minute, the top stories avalanche through the ground floor, crushing 16 sleeping residents.
Many never knew what hit them. No color. Absolutely. I know her name.
No color.
This would make it the third.
I don't know.
I don't know how many others for a few agonizing moments did know.
The awful moment that followed with people crying out in the darkness. Something happened again and again.
Neighbors who had passed each other in the mail room with barely a nod suddenly began risking their lives for people who had been faces without names.
Newlyweds Keith and Hannah Spencer had moved into apartment 365 six months ago.
We used to get our front door open and we just went up and down the hall trying to get as many people open and free as we could.
Rosalie Allard was trapped on the third floor with her diabetic husband who has trouble walking.
A college student they never knew was a neighbor come to the rescue.
He said is anyone in there and we said yes and we couldn't get out.
He said stand back and all of a sudden he kicked through the door and he said you get out right now.
I said I don't know how long you have but get out.
Another college student, a young woman, helped Rosalie's husband down the mangled stairway.
He couldn't get his legs over when we had to almost climb down that balcony, that stairway and she took him and guided him down and it was a wonderful thing.
It's nice to have neighbors isn't it?
Yes, someone we've never known or seen before.
Just be careful man.
I thought I heard somebody barking. I don't know if they were barking or not.
Anybody down here?
We didn't realize what had happened until we came out to the front and everybody was kind of regrouping and starting to get their nerves about them and then we started to hear people's voices and we just started digging with everything we had.
There was a guy named Robert that we dug frantically all night for and his legs were pinned and I never got a chance to see him but we just kept talking to him and tried to keep him calm.
We didn't realize this was an epicenter.
When we left here we went to search for our family. We just prayed that somebody was digging the way that we were.
Thank you.
Sixteen residents of Northridge Meadows did not get out. Some have been crushed so badly that they have been hard to identify.
This is my daughter.
And her name is?
Her name is Myrna Velasquez.
Myrna Velasquez moved into the Northridge Meadows last Thursday. Yesterday her mother found Myrna's car parked in front of her ground floor apartment. She'd been missing since the quake.
We've been just waiting to see if we could hear from them. We thought maybe the phone lines but this is the first I've seen of this apartment building.
What have officials been able to tell you?
They said to contact the coroner and to visit the other shelters.
Late last night the word came that Myrna had been found dead in the wreckage.
In every disaster there is a Northridge Meadows. A building or a plane or a ship. Some place where strangers become saviors. Where unknown neighbors or seat mates become lifelong friends.
The Northridge Meadows will be torn down soon. It's too damaged to be saved.
The lucky residents will move out a few of their belongings. Some clothes, photos, mementos. Some good memories. One absolutely terrifying.
What do you say when you think it's all over? Is it a hug, a kiss, a word?
We held each other so tightly I thought the blood was going to stop flowing in our bodies.
Most residents of the Northridge apartment complex now are awaiting word on when they can retrieve their belongings before deciding where their next home will be.
And Katie, there are stories like that throughout the San Fernando Valley. That was the most severe case.
But in this apartment, for example, it was sheer chaos. And folks from throughout this neighborhood rallied to rescue several people from here.
But look at the resourceful woman in the back of the apartment, second floor. She's had that emergency ladder that you see hanging there since 1964.
It tumbled out of her closet. She got it out of the window, got a caftan on, also got onto her ski boots and crawled down from there.
So some people were a little better prepared than others for all of this, Katie.
A very wise investment, Tom. You know, stories like the ones we just saw really restore your faith in human nature, don't they?
But we were talking earlier, Tom, there's been an awful lot of coverage, obviously, of this quake.
But no matter how devastating the TV pictures are, they don't really show the true extent of the damage, do they?
It is very hard for us to convey just exactly how widespread the damage is here.
For example, over the hills in West Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, South Central California, South Central Los Angeles,
lots of homes with major structural damage that may not be able to be put back together.
Apartment houses are condemned throughout the city. So the damage.
The other big story of the week, the story that is at once bizarre and so troubling in so many ways, the Tanya Harding saga.
This afternoon in Portland, Harding's ex-husband was arrested and charged with plotting the attack on Nancy Kerrigan.
He was jailed briefly, he pleaded not guilty, and he is now out on bail.
This arrest came hours after Harding announced that she is distancing herself from the man with whom she's lived off and on for the past six years or so.
You're about to hear Tanya talk about her relationship with Jeff Galuli.
Now it's Chris Hanson who broke the story of the plot last week, traces Tanya and Jeff's troubled relationship.
A world-class skater with a wild streak, one who can bump with bad to the bone.
She has a taste for Marlboro cigarettes and high-performance carburetors.
That was two years ago. Tanya was putting on a good face after coming so close to winning an Olympic medal.
But the bronze went to Nancy Kerrigan.
Just going to the Olympics was my dream, but actually being in there and being fourth place, I'm thrilled with fourth place.
I mean, I was a little bit disappointed with not getting a medal, but the next Olympics is only two years away, and so I can look forward to that.
Her ambition and ability developed early, and she quickly learned that skating was a good escape from a messy home life.
Here is a little girl who grew up on the rough side of town with, for all practical purposes, a split family.
Her father was her mother's fifth husband. She was purportedly abused as a child, loved by her father,
had a love-hate relationship with her mother.
The ice rink became her home. She spent less and less time at school.
At the age of 15, Tanya dropped out and fell in love with a boy named Jeff Galuli.
He has given her unconditional love and support through all the ups and downs.
He doesn't care whether she skates or whether she works. He wants her to be happy.
But it was a relationship she always ended up having to defend.
My husband is my best friend. He is the person I would trust for anyone.
If anybody accomplishes what they've always wanted to accomplish in life, I don't think they'd want to be alone to do that, and I'm just glad that I'm not alone.
At about the same time, Galuli was a bit more candid about the behind-the-scenes turmoil.
She's definitely setting her ways, and we might get into a little brawl now and then about what's going to go on, and usually she wins.
I mean, I'll admit it to the world, she's the boss of the family.
That's about as good as it ever got for Jeff and Tanya.
Circumstantial evidence seems to be that he was a very disruptive element and influence in her life.
And when he's been around and they've been together, her life is much rockier from the outside than it is when they're apart.
Tanya and Jeff used to come to this bowling alley outside of Portland.
It was here Tanya was seen shooting pool and smoking cigarettes.
There was a flurry of bad publicity about that, but Tanya didn't seem to care.
Sometimes it's sad because of the bad press and everything, but you always have to go with the flow.
And if people want to say things about me, then they have their own opinions and they can say what they would like.
That was her attitude. I am Tanya Harding, a world-class skater.
Darlene Ferguson was a friend to Tanya during the bad times.
She was around when Jeff and Tanya were featured regularly in local police reports for domestic violence.
Tanya continued to skate despite the distractions.
She filed for divorce and was so terrified of Jeff, she got a restraining order.
She was also afraid of Jeff's brother.
They had threatened, I don't know whether I should say they because I wasn't out there,
but she had told us before that they had threatened to break her legs so she couldn't skate.
Now investigators believe it was Jeff Galuli's idea to cripple Nancy Kerrigan and clear Tanya's path to Olympic gold.
Sources tell NBC News Galuli has been linked to payments made to the hitman and the getaway driver.
Galuli denies that.
We're just here to voluntarily surrender to an arrest warrant. That's the only reason we're here.
And even though Tanya has once again separated from Galuli, she may suffer because of their relationship.
Even though she hasn't been charged in the Kerrigan plot, even though her lawyers say she'll be cleared, she has been tainted.
The Olympic Committee may be nervous, but it wouldn't be like Harding to quit now.
I love competing and to work so hard and to get to that point where you can do that, you know, I mean I would have to skate.
If I was on my deathbed then I wouldn't, but I mean it doesn't matter if I'm sick or not. I go out there and I'll skate.
There's no doubt she's one of America's best, but as has happened too often in Tanya's life, the choice may not be hers to make.
And what a moment for this young lady. That's terrific. That's terrific.
Tanya Harding continues to deny that she was involved in the plot to hurt Nancy Kerrigan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Figure Skating Association.
In the middle of an earthquake, Jim said all he could think to do was to pray.
Oh man. Thank you, Lord.
Pediatric nurses are calm by nature.
The nurses here at Anaheim General Hospital say that their babies aren't bothered by earthquakes.
They enjoy being rocked.
But when this quake hit the delivery room, that was something else.
Carol Johnson was one of the delivery room nurses.
We could see the top of the head and so I was like, you know, you're almost there. Keep pushing.
The nurse was telling us to push and push and then she said, OK, let's relax a little bit so we can see the baby's head.
And then that's like right then we start relaxing and then all of a sudden the earthquake came.
You know what I mean? Everything started shaking.
Then everything blacked out and then it was like, oh my God, this is really a big one.
Mom, Monica Sherer, didn't know whether to push or run.
The first thing I thought was that the ceiling was going to fall in on us.
Monica started screaming in panic and I just told her, God is here with us honey, don't worry.
Dr. Sang Kim arrived at the hospital during the quake.
Well, I was scared too, you know.
I felt my way over and found the flashlights and handed them out to everybody.
So, I mean, the doctor, I was counting like the doctor said, OK, push.
About 10 or 12 times a push.
Come on, honey, we got to do it. We can do it. We can do it.
She was real scared.
And then she just pushed her heart and came around.
I was just like, oh my God, what a relief.
We made it and I'm very happy. I'm proud that we have a healthy mother, healthy baby. Everybody's happy.
Are you OK? Yeah?
Oh, and then there's this.
When they put Nikki Nelson on the delivery room scale, she weighed in at six pounds, six ounces.
Six six, just like the earthquake.
Mom, dad and baby are home tonight and doing just great.
We'll be right back.
Here it's a happy footnote to an otherwise very difficult week for Southern California.
But as we have seen before, Katie, Southern Californians are resilient, if nothing else.
And already we are seeing signs that the city is on its way to recovery.
So that's it for this evening.
I'll have continuing coverage of the story tomorrow night on NBC Nightly News.
And Katie, I'll be pleased to see you back in New York. That's right, Tom.
Have a safe trip. I'll see you tomorrow morning on today.
Until then, for all of us here, good night for now.