Woman from Texas Doorbell Video Says She 'Thought She Was Going to Die That Night'

The mystery woman from the Houston-area home surveillance video, seen frantically ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night with shackles hanging from her wrists, has given her first interview about the ordeal.

Speaking to Inside Edition, per The New York Daily News, the woman, who asked that she only be identified as “Lauren,” says that she went to sleep beside her boyfriend of four months only to wake up to “what seemed like a nightmare.”

“I woke up, and he was kneeling on my chest and stuffing some sort of cloths in my mouth,” she told Inside Edition’s Jim Moret. “I truly felt like I was going to die that night.”

Within days of the release of the surveillance video, captured in the early morning of Aug. 24, local police were able to confirm that Lauren was safe and staying with family in Dallas.

While the morbid voyeurism that propelled the video to viral status remains unsettling, Lauren attributes its spread to her safety. Police found her boyfriend, Dennis Collins, dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound not long after the video gained traction online.

“I worried that if this video didn’t come out and if he were not gone, I eventually would be,” she said.