NO WILTING FLOWER

Jodie Cooper is lying face down on the ground with her hands tied behind her back and her mouth taped shut, as several masked gunmen stand around her screaming instructions. “Get down, I’m gonna put a bullet in your head! We want all the money and drugs”, she recalls. “It was intense.”

Jodie had been eating ice cream in the kitchen of her Oahu rental when they burst through the door. “(It was) like that scene out of Point Break”, she says, referencing the Hollywood blockbuster she’d later serve as the surfing stunt double for. But this was no movie. They rifle-butted the owner of the home in the head, splitting him open and dropping him to the floor. Jodie ducked behind the kitchen counter and eyed an escape route. “I was looking out the window going, ‘As soon as I hear a gun go off I’m just gonna jump out’”, she recalls.

Moments later, the gunman lifted her by the seat of her pants and t-shirt, and threw her head first onto the living room floor. Two thoughts went through her head as she was being tied up. The first, “What can I give them? I was literally down to my last five bucks. I was waiting for Mum and Dad to wire me some money”. The second, “What’s that smell? I could smell poo. The guy (tied-up) next to me had shat his pants”, she says.

When one of the gunmen dragged the home owner’s wife into the bedroom and began roughing her up, he caved and they got what they wanted and fled. It was only once it came time to call the cops—which they never did—that the penny dropped for Jodie. “I was just some young naive West Aussie girl. I just thought it was a robbery”, she says. Unbeknownst to her, her Californian hosts had been trafficking low-level commercial quantities of cocaine. Evidently, it hadn’t gone over well with the local gangsters also running the trade. “There was a lot of drugs going down over