Beaten and Left for Dead: The Story of Teri Jendusa-Nicolai

by Dave Alfvin

  Teri had multiple layers of duct tape covering her eyes and head, all of which seriously irritated her. For hours, she toiled fervently at trying to remove the tape, but in her half-conscious state, this was a much, much harder task than it usually would have seemed. She was dressed in her light winter jacket, but wore only underwear from the waist down, as David had kept her sweatpants after the struggle in his living room. Slumped inside the garbage can, upside down with her hands, ankles, and head restrained by duct tape, Teri’s body formed a grotesque letter Z. Her bare feet and lower calves were immersed in a stew of melted snow and ice water. At this point, she could not feel her feet at all.

  Dusk arrived, and the temperature began to drop. There are very few places in Illinois more quiet or lonely than a storage facility on a Saturday night, but it was precisely the reason that David had chosen the location to serve as Teri’s final resting place. Hopelessly alone, abandoned, separated from her children, beaten, frozen, and left for dead…certainly an unfitting end for a loving mother of two young girls.

  Yet these awful thoughts became a catalyst that fired up Teri’s brain, helping it remain active and functional during the long, cold night. Her own rage at this unholy crime became the octane that fueled her burning passion to survive. She refused to capitulate to the monster that had stolen her girls and was slowly murdering her.

  As she lay there, all she could think about was what had happened to her children. “I really didn’t think David would hurt the girls,” Teri recalls. “But where David had taken Amanda and Holly was a question I just couldn’t answer.” At the time, Teri’s best guess was that David had attempted to leave the country with their daughters. Little did she know that Amanda and Holly were, ironically, just a few miles away, safe with their daycare provider.

  The silence inside the locker was somewhat comforting and disturbing at the same time. Occasionally, Teri could faintly hear the sound of a car driving in the distance on some nameless road. Every time she heard one, a panic attack ensued. In her frightened state of mind, she began to think that any one of those vehicles might be David returning to the locker to finish her once and for all. Dead, she would never see Amanda and Holly again, and David would remain as the surviving parent. There was no doubt that she would freeze to death here in the icy room, cut off from the world and the people who could help her. Teri had never imagined death to come for her like this…abandoned in a frozen garbage can in the absolute loneliest of places.

  Somehow, she needed to escape. Somehow. “Please, God, help me,” she prayed. Over and over Teri prayed. Only sixty miles away, hundreds of friends and church members also prayed for Teri’s life, valiantly hoping the horrific blood stains police had recently discovered in David’s house didn’t mean Teri was already dead.

  Teri’s many friends were frantic when they heard news of the Amber Alert and Teri’s disappearance. Pam Gustafson shares her perspective on the awful day of Teri’s abduction:

  It was a cold overcast morning on January 31st. My daughter Hannah and I were at Southridge Mall, in the checkout line at Boston Store, when Hannah’s cell phone rang. It was her father (Ed, my ex-husband). Ed told us that there was an Amber Alert issued for Amanda and Holly Larsen, plus their mother, Teri. His voice sounded worried, and for good reason. Ed knew David Larsen as well as I did.

  With a sinking feeling, I realized David Larson, Teri’s ex-husband and a former colleague on my church council, had probably crossed the line between coherent and irrational. With a sinking feeling, I was resigned to the fact that Teri would be lucky to be found alive.

  Saturday became a day-long struggle of faith, knowing that if Teri died, it wouldn’t be God’s will, but David Larsen’s will that killed her. David believed he knew God’s will and frequently used the Bible verse that included the words “wives, submit yourselves to your husbands” as the reason he was allowed to treat Teri as he did. For David, Teri would always be his wife and his property. “Till death do us part” was a vow he took seriously. It appeared both death and parting were imminent.

  I returned home from the mall, listening to the radio and the repeated broadcasts of the Amber Alert. Knowing Teri had attempted to make contact twice made me feel slightly better, but not much. Judging from history, I knew she was injured—I had experienced the depth of David’s passion for marriage and church as only he can define passion.

  Arriving home, I quickly called Teri’s current husband, Nick, on his cell phone. Jan Johnson, a family friend, answered—she had just been speaking with the police. Teri’s car had been found abandoned in Milwaukee, but there was no sign of Teri or the girls. Was she somewhere in the outdoor elements? We could only helplessly wonder. I was convinced David’s anger was only directed at Teri and not at Holly and Amanda.

  Jan asked me where David’s sister might be living. Somewhere in the conversation, she said, “If she isn’t dead.” That thought had never occurred to me, but now it seemed anything was possible. My rational side kicked in after Jan’s comment, and I replied, “I don’t think that has happened…at least, not yet.” In the early hours of the crisis, the tension was suffocating. Jan said she would keep me informed of any significant news.

  I logged on to the Amber Alert website and to my horror saw a picture of her current and much-loved husband Nick—not a picture of David Larsen. Even though this photographic snafu was cleared up in a few hours, it certainly didn’t help a situation in which every minute counted and reliable information was critical.

  Night fell and it was very cold, in the 20s, not a night where a person could survive outdoors. My boyfriend and I prayed together in my small kitchen that somehow Teri could survive this ordeal…somehow. There was little else we could do for now. My night was restless, and there was little comfort in the recovery of the two girls. Still, we kept the faith. Perhaps in the morning…

  Sunday morning came, sunny and cold, but there was no news about Teri. It was depressing. With a heavy heart, I drove to church with the belief that Teri was dead. The church service was a blur to me, as my thoughts could only focus on Teri. The weight of the crisis made it hard to even walk back to my car after the church service ended.

  Angels of Mercy

  Teri had lost all sense of time during the long hours in her frozen prison. It was a cold and clear January night, and the outside temperature was steadily dropping down to around 10 degrees. Inside the storage locker, the air was bitterly cold, and furthermore, Teri had absolutely no idea where she was. She could hear traffic on some highway in the distance, but the sound of the cars seemed far away. Teri struggled unsuccessfully to get the duct tape off her mouth, attempting to loosen her restraint so that she could breathe with more freedom. All she had in terms of an air supply was a small hole she had created by forcing the tape apart with her tongue.

  Hunched over and surrounded by total blackness, Teri’s eyes had completely swollen shut from the beating and were also still taped.

  “I’m so cold,” she whimpered to herself again and again. Inside the garbage can, the snow had melted somewhat due to Teri’s body temperature, but the pools of water that formed beneath her were ice cold, sapping her temperature and her life away minute by minute.

  In Racine, detectives grilled David Larsen into the night, imploring him to reveal Teri’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, they had ended up against a brick wall, and David was playing dumb. Police read him his Miranda rights at least twice, but he never asked for an attorney.

  Larsen told police he was working on something near the floor at home when he suddenly looked up and saw Teri about to strike him with a large hammer, standing with her sweatpants down at her ankles. But under more intense questioning, Larsen finally admitted that he may have hit Teri with a baseball bat “to defend himself,” but also that he didn’t remember anything else about the incident. Naturally, the police didn’t believe a word of his weak explanation, but time was running out, and the missing woman still had not been located.

  Sever
al miles south in Wheeling, Teri remained trapped in the storage locker, facing a frigid nightmare that was trying to take her life. She had lost all sensation in her legs and most of her arms, and she was suffering severe disorientation due to intense trauma and the bitter cold of an Illinois winter. She knew that many hours had elapsed since David had deposited her there, but at the same time, she wasn’t sure how many. Time seemed to crawl forward in slow motion, interminable and imperceptible in her muddled mind.

  For Teri, her time in isolation was a constant struggle to stay awake and conscious. She feared that she would surely die if she fell asleep. But the stark reality remained—Teri was already well on her way toward dying. Her body was beginning to freeze, especially around her fingers, toes, and extremities. But even though it seemed futile, Teri continued to hope and pray for salvation. Despite the horrific events that landed her in this calamity, she refused to give up. She would not die at the hands of David Larsen. Filled with a new and burning energy brought on by desperation and fury, Teri channeled her anger into fierce motivation to stay awake…and alive, for the sake of her daughters.

  Sunday morning arrived. Teri had by then been in the storage locker for about fourteen hours. Her body temperature hovered slightly above 80 degrees, and she knew she only had a little time left before she would fall asleep, never to wake again. Still, the images of her two daughters kept her partially awake whenever she began to drift off.

  Is this where I’ll die? Teri thought several times in her darker moments. But as always, she soon reverted to her survival instinct. “I can’t die. I just can’t!” she scolded herself repeatedly. But Teri’s resolve was on the verge of breaking, weakened by her rapidly deteriorating physical condition. As resilient and mentally strong as she had remained throughout the ordeal, Teri knew that the inevitable was approaching, and fast. Alone, freezing, and close to death, she finally began to lose the fiery hope that had kept her alive and awake through the night.

  But in a sudden turn of fate, and at the eleventh hour, Teri’s prayers were answered. When Racine County detectives searched David’s wallet, they made a crucial discovery…a receipt from a self-storage locker company in Wheeling, Illinois. They immediately called the storage locker site and ordered the attendant to run to the locker and listen for any sounds. The attendant ran back to the phone and quickly confirmed their suspicions—there were, in fact, noises coming from inside.

  “Call nine one one…now!” one of the detectives bellowed into the phone. Seconds later, Wheeling police and paramedics had been mobilized and were racing to the storage lockers as fast as they could. At the same time, Racine County police and detectives were also making a mad dash across the border to Illinois. Teri’s life hung in the balance, and everyone knew it.

  Meanwhile, inside the pitch-black garbage can, Teri was barely hanging on to consciousness. Her desire for sleep was overpowering her desire to stay awake. But then, through the thick fog clouding her mind, Teri heard a car door slam. Was this David returning to finish her off with a bullet to the head? She didn’t know, and by then, she was simply too weak to be scared anymore. All she could do was wait…and wait for the end to come.

  Teri’s mental fog lifted abruptly when she heard a sudden explosion of noise and commotion from outside. Someone was breaking down the door to the storage locker. Eventually, two Wheeling police officers burst into the locker and began feverishly tearing away the boxes that concealed the plastic garbage can. They quickly located the can, cut the duct tape loose, and hastily pried off the lid to reveal a shivering, half-conscious Teri.

  “Where are the paramedics?” one officer barked into his radio. As it turned out, the paramedics were already on their way and nearly at the storage locker by that point. Gently, the police pulled Teri from the tipped-over garbage can. Cold water and slush poured out onto the floor of the locker as they heaved her from her plastic prison and out to safety.

  What the officers witnessed would be indelibly stamped in their memories for the rest of their lives. Teri’s legs were nearly black from her feet to above her knees, and the horrific discoloration had spread to her arms, past the elbows. Her bloody head was still partially bound in duct tape and swollen to a grotesque size, nearly that of a basketball. It was a gruesome sight for anyone to behold, even for the two seasoned officers. But indeed, the angels of mercy had arrived in the form of the Wheeling police force. Teri’s desperate prayers for rescue, for the sake of her daughters, had finally been answered.

  Teri can scarcely remember hearing the locker door being broken open and the officers yelling for help, nor anything about being pulled from the garbage can, or being lifted onto the stretcher after paramedics arrived. In a few minutes, Teri, wrapped in a cocoon of heavy blankets, was rushed to Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois. The only thing she can recall is a soft, calm, female voice comforting her in the ambulance, telling her that everything would be all right, that she was safe now. Unfortunately, after her ordeal in the locker, Teri was barely clinging on, and despite the woman’s calming words, her life was still in jeopardy.

  Teri's frostbitten feet

  The trash can coffin

  After the ambulance arrived at Advocate Lutheran General, the doctors’ first priority was to stabilize Teri and save her life. Her body temperature had dropped to about 80 degrees in the storage locker, brushing the point just above the “death zone” of body temperature.

  The early plan was to stabilize her to the point where she was no longer in critical condition and then proceed to assessing the frostbite on her legs and determining what they would need to treat or amputate. The early prognosis was that Teri would lose both legs slightly above the knee, and about half of at least one arm. But for now, they would wait to see how much of the frostbitten tissue could repair itself during the first critical days of her recovery.

  After initial treatment, Teri’s vital signs stabilized within a few hours, and her life was no longer in danger. She was sedated so she could recover, granting her a well-deserved twenty-four hours of sleep. Teri still wouldn’t be able to see through her swollen eyes for nearly a week, and her limbs burned. But the important thing was that she was alive, her daughters were safe, and (as she later learned from a nurse) David Larsen was locked up in police custody and wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long, long time.

  But Teri would receive some sad news three days later. She was told by her doctors she had been in the early stages of a pregnancy with her new husband, Nick; but tragically, the brutal beating, the immense trauma, and the storage locker ordeal resulted in a miscarriage. Of the many charges David Larsen would soon face, he would now have to answer to a new one: the murder of an unborn child. Teri accepted the news calmly but nevertheless was understandably quite saddened at the loss of her child. In the end, she accepted the reality of what happened, and did her best to put this new tragedy in perspective.

  In Racine, police delivered David Larsen the news: Teri had been found alive. Larsen’s head promptly dropped in utter disappointment. There was only one person in the world that could have possibly been disappointed with the news of Teri’s rescue, and that person was David Larsen. It was over for him, and he knew it. David’s goal to retire when he was forty had become a bizarre reality for him but certainly not in the way that he planned.

  For Teri’s family and friends, the encouraging news was that her condition was soon upgraded from critical to serious. Teri would not die from her injuries. Indeed, she had just barely managed to survive an ordeal that would have eventually killed her had the police not rescued her when they did. Doctors informed Teri that if she had been in the storage locker for about one more hour, she probably would have died.

  But now, the challenge faced by the doctors and surgeons at Lutheran General was whether Teri would spend the rest of her life with artificial arms and legs or not. Everything hinged on the resilience of her body tissue, as well as its ability to repair the frostbite and return to normal. However, th
e doctors couldn’t guarantee that she would get to keep every part of her that had been damaged.

  Medical Miracles

  Dr. Michael Byun (pronounced bye-OON) is a plastic surgeon, specializing in reconstructive surgery at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois. Byun helped oversee the treatment of Teri’s multiple traumatic injuries (injuries requiring a small team of doctors). Advocate Lutheran General is a Level-1 trauma center.

  After the trauma team stabilized Teri’s early condition, Byun began treatment on her head, face, legs, and feet, and performed the important reconstructive surgery on her crushed skull. Working with the members of his medical team, Byun assessed the extent of Teri’s frostbite and made key decisions on what needed to be amputated. Byun also applied delicate skin grafts to Teri’s most seriously affected areas: the lower extremities from her ankles down, where frostbite literally killed living tissue, and the area where her toes were amputated.

  Byun is a graduate of Northwestern University Medical School and a board-certified plastic surgeon, a specialized area of the medical field requiring seven additional years of study after medical school. He, as much as anyone who helped to save Teri’s life, understands how dangerously close she was to dying from her injuries, and the miraculous nature of her recovery.

  Alfvin: Hello, Dr. Byun, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for providing your insight into Teri’s medical comeback.

  Byun: It’s no problem at all. I’m excited to do this. Teri has maintained contact with me for many years now. She always reminds me that what we did for her at the hospital here was very special…in helping her recover so quickly.

  Alfvin: Indeed…so true. Teri could have been living her life today with three artificial limbs! Doctor, I’d like you to go through Teri’s six weeks at Advocate Lutheran General in a mostly chronological sequence. So, perhaps you can begin with the initial call to treat Teri at the hospital.