After Being Abducted, 2 California Teens Joined Forces to Escape Their Captor: 'We Never Cried' By Virginia Chamlee

Teenagers Tamara Brooks and Jacque Marris had never met before the two experienced an ordeal so harrowing, they were bonded for life.

Brooks, 16, and Marris, 17, were both high school students when the two were abducted, eventually banding together to escape their captor.

A 2002 PEOPLE cover story detailed how, on Aug. 1, 2002, Brooks had driven to Quartz Hill, Calif., — an hour north of Los Angeles — with her friend Eric Brown, 18, at roughly 11:30 p.m.

Shortly afterwards, Roy Ratliff, 37, a career criminal, who was then wanted on a rape charge, pulled up in a stolen gray Saturn.

Brooks initially thought Ratliff was a police officer and that the two were in trouble. “Then I saw the gun. He said, ‘Give me all your money,'” she told PEOPLE. “I didn’t even have a purse. I was terrified. I was shaking. I was trying to appear calm, but I had the biggest lump in my throat.”

“He told Eric to get out. Eric kept saying, ‘I don’t want to die,'” she continued. “I couldn’t talk at all. I was praying: ‘Please let me live. I want to live to see my family.’ “

Ratliff then led Brown out of the car and bound him with duct tape before coming back and taping Brooks’ arms to the armrest.

That same night, Marris and her friend Frank Melero had also driven up to Quartz Hill and were parked nearby. That’s when Ratliff shifted his sights on them.

“All of the sudden, he was at my door,” Melero, then 19, told PEOPLE. “He stuck the gun in my face and told me to throw out my wallet. He took about $60 and seemed really mad. He wanted some rope. I had some in the back of the truck. He kept the gun in my back when I got out of the car and went to get it.”

When a state utility worker pulled up, Ratliff kept his gun trained on Melero, telling him not to speak or move. When the worker left, Ratliff took Melero out of the car and drove off with Marris and Brooks inside Brown’s now-stolen vehicle.

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Shortly after, Melero managed to free himself and call his mom with his cell phone. She then called 911, and when police arrived, they freed Brown, who offered a description of his stolen car, a Ford Bronco.

Meanwhile, in the stolen Bronco, Marris and Brown quickly teamed up.

“It was right at the start that the bonding started. I knew I wasn’t alone in this,” Marris told PEOPLE.

Brooks echoed, “It’s funny. We never cried once, neither of us, during all those hours. Only when we knew we were safe. Then we cried a lot.”

Marris explained how the duo, who were loosely tied and had duct tape over their mouths, “began to communicate by drawing letters on each other’s hands.”

“The first thing we wrote was: ‘What shall we do?’ We began to make a plan,” she added.

Brooks knew Brown kept a Bowie knife in the car, thinking that if the two could find it, they might be able to escape.

“You could see the pulse in his throat. He went to sleep at one point while we were parked, and we thought about it then. I hoped I wouldn’t go to hell for killing him,” Brooks told PEOPLE.

While they were parked, the girls jumped into action, with Marris grabbing the knife and stabbing Ratliff while Brooks bashed him in the face with a bottle before they pushed him out the door. However, he had only been wounded.

“He was yelling, ‘Open the door or I’ll kill you!’ We were yelling back at him,” Marris recounted. “I was saying, ‘Don’t you believe in Jesus? Isn’t there going to be anyone who will be upset if you die?’ He told us that no one cared about him.”

“Then he fired a warning shot over the car,” she continued. “We knew we had to let him in. He told us he’d have to shoot one of us because he couldn’t handle us both. He kept saying things like, ‘The first one to find my glasses lives.’ We told him no, we’re sticking together.”

After Ratliff got back behind the wheel and the Bronco went speeding down the road, someone reported spotting the car 100 miles north of Quartz Hill. Soon, they had Ratliff surrounded.

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“All of the sudden, I saw the police, and they were shooting at him. He climbed over the seat and was right beside me,” Marris remembered. “He had his head on my shoulder. I was waving to the shooter to tell him that we were in there too.”

She continued, “He was hit several times, and he yelled to the cops, ‘I have the girls, don’t shoot.’ Before he had yelled, when they first came up, ‘I have the girls,’ like he was using us as a hostage. But when he yelled the last time, he looked me in the eye with such despair. It was like he was telling the cops, ‘Don’t shoot the girls.’ In a crazy way, I think he was protecting us.”

As the girls were removed from the car, reports indicate that Ratliff raised his gun once more before being fatally shot by officers.

In total, it was a 12-hour ordeal, with Marris and Brooks there for one another every step of the way.

“We were really there for each other,” Marris told PEOPLE. “We said, ‘I came here with her, and I’m leaving with her.’ “