Sid Roth - Murdered 2-Year-Old Comes Back to Life
Sid Roth: Hello, I'm Sid Roth, your investigative reporter. How would you feel if you found out your 2-year-old daughter was just abducted? My guests, Pam and Steve Johnson, found out - how did you find out, Pam?
Pam Johnson: My son and daughter were sitting on the front porch and my son, Brian, came running in and said, "Mommy, a boy has just taken Theresa".
Sid Roth: What happened in your heart?
Pam Johnson: I just - everything stopped. My world stopped, because it was obvious that my son was very upset and I asked him, "Which way"?, and he pointed up the street, and I just ran out the door and ran up the street calling her and looking everywhere for her.
Sid Roth: And how about you? What were you doing?
Steve Johnson: I was downstairs. I heard a commotion upstairs, so I ran out the front door and I saw Brian. He was obviously in distress. I said, "Brian, what's happened"? He said a boy has run off with Theresa. So I said, "Hop in the car". And he pointed up the road so we followed it that way. We saw Pam, but no Theresa. And immediately we began calling on God, saying, "God, help! God, help"! Just spontaneously. Our phone wasn't hooked up at that point so we ran to a neighbor's and dialed 9-1-1.
Sid Roth: You were just moving into a new house.
Steve Johnson: That's right, a brand new house, and we said, "Our daughter's been abducted. She's wearing a blue mickey mouse t-shirt, red shorts, sandy hair". And then we began searching the neighborhood. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Just going house to house, meeting our new neighbors.
Sid Roth: This isn't supposed to happen! This just happens to someone else, not...
Steve Johnson: No!
Pam Johnson: Not in a little town.
Sid Roth: A boy is taking your 2-year-old and - did you call the police?
Steve Johnson: Oh, absolutely.
Pam Johnson: Yeah. We both called 9-1-1 separately. I ran to my neighbor and met her for the first time and said, "I had a horrible accident. Please let me use the phone" and called 9-1-1 and told them the statistics. Immediately it seemed like God was acting on our behalf because the dispatcher was a friend of ours who also knew God and so took the information but was able to begin to pray with us.
Sid Roth: Now, I understand, was it your mother that had dreams before this happened that?
Steve Johnson: We learned after the fact that my mom had dreams three nights in succession that Theresa had - had been injured by someone, was lying dead on a piece of grass. Each night she saw Theresa's body, dead. She woke up in a fright. She said, "God, I don't know what's happening, but take care of my granddaughter". We believe that God inspired that or allowed that to happen in order that prayer could be up front to help circumvent things.
Sid Roth: Well, he was warning you to pray, is what was going on. So, where did they find Theresa?
Pam Johnson: Theresa was found 45 minutes after we called 9-1-1, in a culvert. She had been beaten and she was naked. She was submerged under water. He had actually placed concrete blocks on her body so that it wouldn't float away. The only thing that was exposed was one little foot.
Sid Roth: How could they even find her with a concrete block over her? That little foot out of a stream?
Steve Johnson: It's supernatural, Sid. Two people in the community that we really didn't know at that time, Christian folks, were at a taco time restaurant and they had just heard the news that our daughter was missing and presumed abducted. While they were sharing their lunch together, suddenly one of them had a vision of a great huge, red 8-sided stop sign. Her companion across the table said, "I just had this urge to yell "Stop"! They said, "Well, we can't do that here in a restaurant". Then the vision changed and there was a person that seemed like in a khaki uniform walking over a bridge looking for someone. They both spontaneously yelled "Stop"! In the restaurant there. The vision changed again. This woman saw a creek about 18 inches deep, fast running water, a little child lying dead, pinned by concrete blocks, eyes fixed...Dead. We believe, if you could synchronize your watches and get it all on tape, one of the - the police were searching for our daughter, sheriff's deputies, all sorts of community members, but one neighbor was walking down this creek bank and she took a little peek inside of culverts and then she planned on walking on. And she said her feet froze. She couldn't move, Sid! And she said, "That's not good enough". She got down, waded in the water, went through the wooden grill and found our daughter's body there weighted down with concrete blocks.
Sid Roth: How long had your daughter been under water?
Steve Johnson: Between 30, up to 40 minutes. It's hard to say.
Sid Roth: When the paramedic found her, what did he do?
Steve Johnson: Our report was when they saw her initially, they were just appalled, because she was dead. The paramedic said, "I've seen people that are "Dead" and can be revived and people that are simply gone". And Theresa was gone. But this was another one of those coincidences that God orchestrated, that this man and his partner on the unit were Christian men, and they started to do the medical discipline, but they also were laying their hands on and calling on the name of Jesus to bring life back into this little child.
Sid Roth: Now, I understand they did something so that sand came out of her mouth? What was that?
Pam Johnson: He said when he saw her he saw that they were doing vigorous resuscitation...
Sid Roth: But if she was dead, why were they doing this?
Pam Johnson: Well, it's just common that if it's an adult they may not have continued, but because she was a child they just do what they're supposed to do. And her abdomen was distended, so he said he just picked her up upside down and squeezed her and all this sand and water came out. He said it's not in the protocol, but it's...
Sid Roth: So why did he do it?
Pam Johnson: He doesn't know why. He said maybe it was the Holy Spirit.
Steve Johnson: Spontaneous, led by the Holy Spirit.
Sid Roth: Okay, what happened next?
Pam Johnson: Well, the police officer found Brian and I and took us to the hospital, and so we actually got there before the ambulance did, and when they came in the ambulance door, as I saw my daughter on the gurney, she was naked, covered with silt, and they were doing cpr, and she was gray. I'm a nurse, and once I've seen people that are about ready to die and those that are dead: there was no question in my mind that she was gone. And I looked at the EMT very professionally because I wanted to know, and...
Sid Roth: How could you do that? It's your daughter! How could you be very professional?
Pam Johnson: Oh, I think there's something that takes over there. You don't want to deal with the emotion so you border over onto the medical.
Sid Roth: Okay. What did he tell you?
Pam Johnson: He just told me what he had seen and that they were taking her to the icu, so we just kind of lamely followed because we didn't know what else to do at that point.
Sid Roth: What was going on inside of you?
Steve Johnson: Well, I'll tell you what was happening in me, Sid. The Spirit of God rose up in me. Three weeks before this, before this event, God had spoken to my heart and said, "Steve, the next miracle you'll see is a resurrection from the dead". And that just was deposited in me. When they brought Theresa in through the er room doors, we had no idea what had happened. She was just missing, and so here she is. I saw her dead. You know, I'm a pastor and I do funeral services. I know what a dead body is. Our daughter was dead, gray: she was gone. But something rose up within me at that time. It was the Spirit of God and Zechariah says "He'll give them a spirit of grace and of supplication", and that just came over me, and I began imploring God by his grace - it was just his grace saying, "Life: life from the dead".
Sid Roth: I'll tell you what, hold that thought. We're going to find out about life from the dead. Don't go away. We'll return with Sid Roth and
Sid Roth: Hello, I'm Sid Roth, your investigative reporter. What would happen if your 2-year-old daughter was abducted, found buried in water with a cement block over her head, just a tiny bit of her body showing, a miracle they even found her. Dead. They brought her to the hospital. The mother and father are there, and Steve Johnson, you prayed out for all you were worth and it was almost - you were...
Steve Johnson: It wasn't me praying. It was the Spirit of God. We don't know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit of God blew in and 30-40 people from the community, from various churches, gathered there and they began to pray, and God gave them supernatural intelligence as to how to pray. For example, one woman was in the hospital atrium in a prayer group and she suddenly had this strange word come into her head. It was the word "Medulla oblongata'"
Sid Roth: That is strange!
Steve Johnson: That sounded - what is that? Is that something medical? And someone there, she asked, "Is there such a thing as a medulla oblongata? And they said, "Yeah, that's the center of respiration and circulation in the brain"! And they said, "Well, the Lord is directing us to pray for the medulla", and so they did. And God would give them supernatural revelation as to how to pray and people from the er would come and give reports and say, "We need to pray for this" and they'd say, "Well, we've already been doing that".
Sid Roth: What was that breeze in the emergency room? Tell me about that.
Pam Johnson: Well, they - people that were there, even a patient walking down the hall said, "I feel such an energy in this room! What is it? What is it"? And one of the EMTs that was doing percussions on Theresa's chest said he kind of zoned in and forgot about everybody else in the room. It was just he and Theresa, and he said he felt a warm tropical wind come at his back, down his arms, and into Theresa's body and she began to breathe.
Sid Roth: What happened? What happened, in your opinion, at that moment?
Steve Johnson: God brought life from the dead. You see, Theresa was without a heartbeat of her own for an hour and 15, or an hour and 30. She was just flat-out gone. In fact, her blood pH values fell to 6.3. That means her body became more and more acidic. 6.3 is a great blood gas value for a corpse, but not for a live person. Medical people will say it's just unthinkable that someone would come back...
Sid Roth: Wait a second. I have heard of people that are under water for a period of time and because of the temperature of the water or whatever, they do survive. What about in your daughter's case?
Steve Johnson: Well, this was a warm July day, a warm creek. This was no cold water drowning that could cause that mammalian diving reflex that some people report about. The pH values speak for themselves. You consult with a medical doctor...
Sid Roth: Who said she was dead?
Pam Johnson: The doctors in the emergency room said she was dead when she revived - the emt said she was dead - I'm sorry, the police officer that saw her knew she was dead. He said he was horrified because he had hoped that they would just find her and it was some kind of mistake, and here was this little dead child and he was looking at her and he was in the ambulance while they were doing cpr, holding her chest, watching them work on a dead body, and he actually went out to look for a murderer, and then when he heard that she had been revived he was astonished and rededicated his life to Christ.
Sid Roth: What happened to you when it really dawned on you that your daughter is dead? Did you believe she would come back to life?
Pam Johnson: I had not heard God speak to me about that, so I surrendered myself to the Lord and I thanked him for the two and a half years that I had had, and I reminded him of all that he done in those years and the joy that I'd had in her life, and if that's all that he gave me, I was going to thank him for it. But I wanted more.
Sid Roth: Steve, you really believed she was going to come back, didn't you?
Steve Johnson: God is a God of signs and wonders, and too often we minimize what the Almighty can do, and you know, Jesus had told his disciples, "The works I do, you will do, and greater works shall you do". But it's not just an individual. This is not a story about one superhero praying a prayer. This is about the body of Christ, the people who follow Jesus Christ praying in a focused, concerted, yielded manner and the Holy Spirit taking those prayers and bringing a miracle, and we take these stories, a template for what God would like to do in other people's lives, that he wants his people to come together two or three, or hundreds or thousands, and do great works.
Sid Roth: You know, life is really strange. It really is. You don't know when you're going to die. They had no idea their 2-year-old daughter was going to die under such circumstances. I can't wait to find out what happened. This life from the dead will be right back.
Sid Roth: Hello, I'm Sid Roth, your investigative reporter, and what you are witnessing is absolutely amazing. This young couple, pam and Steve Johnson, find their 2-year-old daughter at the bottom of a creek, been there a half hour, pronounced dead by several of the doctors, by the hospital. She was taken to the hospital and because of prayer and supernatural intervention in the invisible world, she literally came back to life. When you found out she was alive, what did you think, mother?
Pam Johnson: I was thrilled. I had seen that she was dead and of course we didn't get all these facts put back together right away, but I was also very exhausted and somewhat in shock myself at that point, and they wanted to fly her out to children's hospital because they saw that she was going to recover. They didn't know how much she was going to recover.
Sid Roth: Did they suspect there would be, like, brain damage...
Pam Johnson: Oh, definitely. And when we arrived at children's hospital, they told us that she had a 50-50 chance of surviving this and that there was simply no chance of her having normal brain activity.
Sid Roth: So, you have a daughter that comes back from the dead, Steve, a 50-50 chance of surviving if she survives, brain damage. What did you believe?
Steve Johnson: I couldn't hear it. I had heard the words, but I couldn't believe it because I figured, God's going to raise her from the dead and he's going to continue the work! We're part of a miracle! He's going to keep the promise that he put in my heart to bring her all the way back full force.
Sid Roth: What happened next?
Steve Johnson: Well, Theresa was in the ICU room. They had all sorts of tubes in her body. They were treating her. She was sedated so she wasn't alert, but later that night she came awake.
Sid Roth: Were you there when she came awake?
Pam Johnson: No. They tried to call us but somehow didn't reach us. But the nurse reported to us that Theresa woke up, and that even though she was intubated so she could not speak, that she was responding appropriately to the questions they were asking her, so when we arrived that morning the doctors and the nurses were all a-titter. They were so excited because this was indeed a miracle. The senior physician brought his interns in and they all gathered around her bed and they would sidle up to me and say, "You know what the pH was, don't you? This is very unusual. This is amazing". And then once in a while somebody would say, "This is truly a miracle".
Steve Johnson: Dr. Moya, the chief physician at children's hospital, said this is off the charts.
Sid Roth: What is Theresa's condition today, proud father? Tell me about your daughter.
Steve Johnson: I am a proud father. I love this young lady. She's 14 now and a beauty. She is very active, vivacious, fully bright. She plays the piano. She drives our riding lawnmower around, mowing the grass, singing her own songs, plays, reads with her little sisters, sews with grandma. She's just a fully bright, vivacious young lady today.
Sid Roth: And Pam, what exactly happened to her? What did this young man do to her?
Pam Johnson: He was a very angry young man. He'd never met Theresa or our family before and he just wanted someone to take his anger out on, and so he - I believe he was going to molest her but because she cried, he beat her and then he submerged her under the water and then held her body down with this concrete block so that it wouldn't float away.
Sid Roth: Well, you have a daughter. She's supernaturally recovered. You have this young man that did a horrible thing to her. I guess the two of you really hated him.
Pam Johnson: No. You know, that was part of the miracle, too, because hate never came into our minds. We recognized that that man, young man was so abducted by the enemy of our souls that he needed a miracle, too. And so we were able to forgive him.
Sid Roth: Wait a second. I've got to ask you this. Did your daughter, a 2-year-old, experience, show evidence of trauma as a result of what happened to her? Was she fearful at night? What was going on inside of her?
Pam Johnson: Well, during the recovery in the hospital, we went through all kinds of things. We really had to fight for our daughter in prayer. We really had to seek God continually for a full recovery, but she has no remembrance of this whole incident. She is not afraid of water. She loves to swim. She is not afraid of strangers or other people. She just has a full and abundant life.
Sid Roth: Wonderful. You forgive this young man. What about you? You're the father,
Steve Johnson: You know, absolutely, and there is no hatred or animosity. We saw him as an abducted person by Satan abducting a little child, and our heart's prayer is that this young man's life would be changed.
Sid Roth: What happened to him?
Steve Johnson: Well, he was found. He did give a confession. He is now serving life in prison. Our hearts go out for him. We pray for him...
Sid Roth: Have you tried to be in contact with him?
Steve Johnson: Yeah, I have. I tried occasionally to correspond with him. He doesn't write back, but we saw him in jail during those early days.
Sid Roth: What did you say to him when you saw him?
Steve Johnson: You know, I just affirmed to him that we love him and that Jesus Christ is real and his life can be changed.
Sid Roth: Steve! This was a horrible thing that was done to your daughter! How can you do this?
Steve Johnson: Well, it's supernatural, Sid. It's the supernatural power of God Almighty. And, you know, I could picture myself tackling him, beating him up, just, you know, I can picture that, but it's just not in the heart because God's done something new in our hearts in regards to this young man.
Sid Roth: Do you really love him?
Steve Johnson: Yes, we do, sincerely.
Sid Roth: How important was prayer in your whole daughter's miracle?
Pam Johnson: Oh, it wouldn't have happened without prayer. God encouraged us to pray, of course, because we believe in prayer, but then he gave us answers back as we prayed so then we could pray those answers when there was what we could call a word of knowledge from outside of our understanding, some sort of information that helped us pray specifically for her, and then it would happen! It was so important.
Sid Roth: Give me a specific example.
Pam Johnson: When Theresa was in the hospital and she was going through recovery they had taken her off the respirator and she just had oxygen and they were working on her lungs, and we were praying in a little group and one of our friends said, "You know, I am impressed that we should pray for her left lung". I said, "Okay, we'll pray for her left lung". So we were standing there praying. A doctor comes out and says, "Her oxygen level has gone down. It appears that her left lung is filling with fluid". And we would just smile and say, "We already know".
Steve Johnson: God's let us know.
Sid Roth: You really were moving in a supernatural confidence!
Pam Johnson: Yes, we were. It was very exciting.
Sid Roth: It's very exciting, but I want to know, even - what about the fact that she might be a vegetable?
Pam Johnson: Well, you know, God was doing such incredible things. She was dead, and there - I mean, when your ph drops to 6.3, that matter in your brain doesn't stay in consistency: it becomes Jello. So God already did an incredible miracle just to bring her back to the point that she was breathing again. At that point we weren't willing to accept what they were saying. What they had said in the beginning didn't happen. She wasn't dead anymore, so let's go for the whole wad!
Steve Johnson: Let's do the whole thing. You know, in a battle you don't constantly meditate, "What if we lose? What if we're killed"? You don't - you have to set that aside to go for the win, and we want to go for the win following the Lord.
Sid Roth: Steve, there's someone that is watching us right now that God himself told to watch. Maybe they don't know God told them to watch us, but they are watching. They have a horrible circumstance in their life. What advice would you give them? Look right in the camera.
Steve Johnson: I'll tell you this: I would say that God is living, he's loving: he cares about you. He wants to hear you call on his name. Scripture tells us, "As many as call on him are saved". Gather friends around you and in a focused, concerted way, pour out your heart to him. Say, "God, this is my need" and look for him to answer. Don't just call one or two friends, but in a concerted, focused way say, "Oh God, I'm taking a-hold of your coattails. I'm calling on you in the name of Jesus. Hear my plea".
Sid Roth: I want you to know one very important thing: "God is no respecter of persons". What he has done for this family, he is so desirous to do for you, so you that are in a hopeless, horrible situation, number one, God knows this, and number two, he loves you and he wants to change the circumstance, but the question is, without faith in his word, you can't please him. I suggest you start reading the Bible and find a promise from God, and that promise is your promise. And raise up with righteous indignation just as Steve Johnson said, "You can't! She's going to live and not die"!
Steve Johnson: That's right.
Sid Roth: "She is going to live and not die"! And you are going to live because there is a life - there's something better than what you have. Intimacy with God through the Messiah of Israel, Yeshua, Jesus, is as far as your next word. Say, "Yeshua, Yeshua, oh, Jesus, I love you, God". Lift up your hands, begin to worship him. Tell him how much you love him. "I love you, Yeshua! I worship you! You're the Jewish Messiah! I praise your holy name! I praise the mighty name of Yeshua"!