An American tourist in Cancun, Dustan Jackson, A Utah Resident, narrowly escaped death in Mexico at the hands of a man wielding a machete after being brutally assaulted and left for dead on the streets of Cancun while on vacation.
Jackson was, during the attack, struck multiple times by the blade of his assailant’s machete. The attack was so vicious and brutal that he had his foot severed and his shoulder destroyed by the multiple, savage blows.
Preceding the attack, Jackson, in Cancun with his wife, decided to find some chewing tobacco. He didn’t know the area well-enough to find any on his own, so he asked a cab driver to take him to a store that sold tobacco.
And that’s where his troubles began. The cabbie and a gang of Mexicans kidnapped him and left him for dead.
They did so by ambushing him when he left the cab, knocking him unconscious, severing his foot with a machete, and hacking at his shoulder. Jackson thinks they were trying to cut his tendons to stop him from walking and getting help.
“I get out, and I’m like, okay, as I’m walking in… then book, lights out,” said Jackson as he described the savage attack to Fox News. “Next thing I know, I am waking up in a ditch.”
“They went to cut my Achilles tendon, and they missed. Instead of hitting it, they hit the bottom of my foot, and then my foot just flapped around. They were trying to cut all my tendons and leave me for dead.”
He was then lying in the ditch they left him in for two harrowing days before finding the strength to get up and find help. Speaking about that, he said:
“I was laying there, pretty much just waiting to die, something inside of me, that strength came to me and said, ‘You’ve got family, you’ve got kids. Get up.’”
A police officer brought Jackson to the airport and rendered first aid to him on the way. Again at the airport, he began strangers for help, and many turned him down until a woman from Africa, whose flight had been canceled, assisted him.
Jackson is now in an American hospital revering from reconstructive surgeries to repair his injured foot and shoulder.
Describing the after-effects of the attack on his shoulder, Jackson said:
“My shoulder’s completely fake now. There is no more real bone in there. The doctors think it’s from him showing me out of a vehicle probably.”
Finally, Jackson offered a reflection on his near-death experience and a brave outlook on life that can serve as great advice to many others.
“I take the little times in life, I don’t take them for granted anymore. You just don’t know what life is going to bring you, so never give up. Keep going. Everybody has a purpose.”
Jackson, who was on vacation in Cancun at the time of the brutal assault, now hopes to create some sort of documentary-style film about it to show his fellow Americans the dangers of traveling to Mexico, a land brutalized by the war on drugs and narco-terrorism.
By: Goose
