A bullet for bravery

  Every spring, college kids gather at the beach to celebrate the end of winter. They've worked hard. Now they play hard. On this day at a beachside motel two men in ski masks are armed with 9 mm semi-automatics. They burst into a room filled with college kids.

  "Throw your wallets on the bed," a gunmen yells. One macho collegian tells the bandits to, "jam it." They do—they jam the barrel of a 9 mm up his nose. The boy quiets down quickly. Wallets are tossed into a pillow case. The short gunman grabs a pretty co-ed by the hair and tells the others, "Stay cool — otherwise this pretty little thing is dead."

  The pretty hostage faints dead away. "I don't need this," the gunman says as he releases his grip on the unconscious girl. She falls to the floor limp as a wet dish cloth. The gunman grabs another co-ed — this one is defiant. She stares into her captor's eyes, letting him know she is unafraid. This bold hostage is forced at gunpoint into a pickup parked just outside.

  Nobody tries to follow, at least not right away. The college kids are certain the bandits will kill the girl if they try to follow. Police are called. Of 14 people in the double suite, you'd think at least one could give a good description of the bandits. Nobody can. They do agree that what they saw was "the end of the barrel of a very large gun."

  The 19-year-old brave-hearted woman was found two hours later on the grassy median 100 miles north of the motel — two bullets in the back of her skull. The frightened girl? The one that fainted? Police suspect the fainting spell was staged because she was scared. So what! At least that girl, the frightened girl, lived to tell her story.