we are NOT going to die!

3 days of death, despair and survival
'We're gonna die, why don't we just end it quicker?'
By Jennifer PangyanszkiCNN


Friday, September 9, 2005; Posted: 11:00 p.m. EDT (03:00 GMT)
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (CNN) -- Trapped inside the darkened, stifling hot attic of her flooded home in New Orleans with her two teenage daughters, Debbie Este watched her own mother die as they waited for help she thought would never come.

For three days they waited, sweating and stripped nearly naked because of the 110 degree heat, with no food and running out of water. The rising water reached the attic and threatened the survival of anyone inside the yellow-sided, single-story house. During half the time they were trapped, the body of Debbie's mom, Melissa Harold, 68, who didn't make it through the ordeal, lay lifeless on the attic floor. Debbie and her girls -- Tiffany, 16, and Amanda, 13 -- could hear the churn of helicopters overhead, evacuating neighbors near their house on Arts Street. The sound only reminded them that nobody had come to their rescue. Their own screams for help were unanswered. Fear got the better of Debbie. She felt so hopeless, she thought about using painkillers she had with her to end her and her daughters' plight. "I said nobody's going to come save us up here and I don't wanna die like this, three days laying in this stinky, dirty water," Debbie Este said this week. "I couldn't take it anymore. We're gonna die, why don't we just end it quicker?'" At that time, stories of life and death and desperation were taking place across New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina's fury swept through the Gulf Coast, raising the waters and breaching the levees that kept the city and its homes above water. For the Estes, one family member was left dead and Debbie and her two daughters made it out alive, joining the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Before their eventual rescue and relocation to a shelter in Baton Rouge, however, the three trapped survivors had to rescue themselves from succumbing to Debbie Este's desperation. Debbie, who is 47 and uses a wheelchair, had carried her painkillers -- 60 Loratab 10s -- into the attic. And she asked the girls to swallow the pills with her to end the suffering. "She kept on saying, come on and take 'em," said Tiffany, who marked her 16th birthday in the Baton Rouge River Center shelter on Monday. "I just kept telling her we were going to be saved, but really, I didn't know." Amanda swayed her mother from suicide by talking about her future. "I said I want to finish school and have a job and have kids and have a husband," Amanda said. "She was miraculous. I couldn't believe it," Debbie said of her younger daughter. "I was so proud of her. She just screamed like that for hours and hours. Her and Tiffany kept saying we weren't going to die up here." Tiffany doesn't remember much else, having slept most of the time, even though her mom regularly woke her up, afraid she had died. "After my grandma died, I just went to sleep. She thought I'd died, but I was just sleeping.".......................