David Rojas’ near-death experience

Step 1

Before · David’s account

A musician whose career is going very well

David Rojas is a musician. As a boy, he picked out by ear on his grandmother’s piano the songs he heard on the radio. He studied music for ten years in Montreal and came back to Mexico eager to try everything. He even earned a pilot’s license.

In the end, he chose music. He sets up his own recording studio in Ciudad Satélite, just outside Mexico City. He is musical director of the OTI Festival and of artists such as Emmanuel. He is doing very well. He has a good car and a good house.

He says he is Catholic, “not a fanatic” (translated from Spanish). In 1998 he has no interest at all in the paranormal.

Step 2

Wednesday, June 3, 1998 · 10:12 p.m. · David’s account

An attempted kidnapping outside his studio

He arrives at his studio with his girlfriend. He has plans to watch Game 1 of the NBA Finals with some friends: the Chicago Bulls against the Utah Jazz.

He stops on the private street where the studio is. He notices a car pulling up behind him. When he opens the door, someone hits him on the head with the butt of a pistol. There are four or five men. They push his girlfriend into the back seat and shove him over the gearshift.

The car’s digital clock shows 22:12 (10:12 p.m.) on Wednesday, June 3. David says he remembers it as if he were living it right now.

His car has an anti-theft system. If the door is opened and closed, the car shuts off. And it won’t start again without a code. The car won’t start.

Step 3

That night · David’s account

Shot in the leg

One of the men pulls out a 9 mm pistol and shoots him in the left leg. It doesn’t hurt. It feels like a kick. The attackers run off, firing five times at his girlfriend. They miss.

The bullet has shattered his femur and passed very close to the femoral artery. He can’t get up. He is losing a lot of blood. To slow the bleeding, he pushes a finger into the hole where the bullet came out, near his groin.

The ambulance takes a long time. He doesn’t know how long. It may have been fifteen minutes or half an hour. He is terribly cold, even though it is June. They put a tourniquet on him and take him away.

Step 4

At the hospital · Semiconscious · David’s account

He arrives at the hospital semiconscious

He is taken to a public social security hospital. He estimates that he has lost more than a liter of blood. He arrives “semiconscious.”

An investigator from the public prosecutor’s office arrives before he goes into the operating room, because gunshot victims have to give a statement.

David can’t speak. They wheel him into the operating room.

Step 7

After the operation · Awake · David’s account

He wakes up not knowing whether he is alive

The next thing he remembers is a fairly dark ward, with two or three patients next to him. The anguish, the pain, and the cold all come back at once.

He doesn’t know whether he is alive or dead. He wonders whether what he saw really happened or whether he dreamed it.

Step 8

On waking · David’s account

He recognizes the surgeon who operated on him

He is almost convinced he dreamed it. Then a doctor walks in. David asks him for something for the pain. Then he asks: “Hey, you operated on me, didn’t you?”

“Yes. How do you know?” “Because I remember you.”

“How can you remember me? We’d never met.”

It is the chief surgeon, Dr. Gilberto Eduardo Mesa. He is tall, thin, and dark, with glasses and his hair combed back. David also describes the second doctor to him, shorter and blond. He later learns that this is Dr. Alegre. The name means “cheerful” in Spanish. He jokes that Dr. Alegre “was anything but.”

Step 9

On waking · David’s account

A doctor who wasn’t there

Then there is the third doctor. David describes him as even shorter, young, very dark-skinned, “sort of like someone from India,” and smiling a lot.

The surgeon answers: “No, there were only two of us.”

David insists that there were three, because he saw them in order of height. He asks whether the surgeon is joking. “I don’t like to joke, especially not about that kind of thing.”

Years later, when they had become friends, David asked the surgeon again. The surgeon told him there was no one like that on his team.

To David, that third doctor was an angel overseeing his operation. He never found out who he was.

Step 10

The following weeks · David’s account

The man in the next bed

He spends three or four weeks in the hospital, with his leg in traction. A plate with 12 screws has been put in his femur.

In the bed next to him is an older man, very ill. David chats with him. He thinks the man’s name was Don Lázaro. Early one morning, the man is taken to surgery. He says that later he sees the man brought back to the next bed on a gurney. He asks how it went, and the man only murmurs.

In the morning the bed is empty. A nurse tells him the man died during the operation and was never returned to the ward: “We never brought him back.”

“To this day, I don’t have the answer,” he says. There is no way to check this part.

Step 11

Afterward and today · David’s account

He talks about death with people who are afraid of it

David says that since then he has had encounters with “spirit beings.” He says he sees them and has recorded them. Today he calls himself a “ghostologist.” He has been on television since 1999 or 2000 and has a show, Historias de fantasmas [Ghost Stories].

He gives free talks in hospitals and nursing homes. In them he says: “I was dead, and for me it was a pleasant experience.”

Once, after a show, a woman sat and waited until the line had cleared. She had terminal cancer and three weeks to live. She asked him: “What does it feel like to be dead?” He hugged her and told her she could go in peace.

His story needs someone else to tell it. That could be the surgeon, Dr. Alegre, the anesthesiologist, or the operative report.