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'It was just total panic'

Woman seeks $10 million in storage facility ordeal

09/27/03

By GARY McELROY
Staff Reporter

A woman who survived being stuck in a storage unit for 63 days told jurors Friday of cold, hunger, thirst and despair as her civil suit continued in Mobile County Circuit Court.

Wanda Hudson, 44, is suing Parkway Storage, located on Dauphin Island Parkway. She is asking $10 million, claiming negligence on the company's part.

For a few minutes Friday, it looked as though attorney Mallory Mantiply's case against the company would self-destruct when Hudson, out of the presence of the jury, balked at testifying.

Circuit Judge Rick Stout was readying to call her to the witness stand when she began shaking her head. She then left the courtroom weeping. Mantiply followed. When they returned together a short while later, she was apparently ready.

Her testimony was often compelling, but also often incoherent.

She had difficulty at times staying on track when answering Mantiply's questions and, during cross-examination, those of Parkway Storage's attorney, Bert Taylor.

According to Hudson's testimony, her tribulation began sometime on the evening of Nov. 7, 2001, when the facility's manager came upon the unit Hudson had rented, noticed a sliding metal door partially open and the unit unlocked.

Once he shut it and walked off, both sides of the suit agree, Hudson did not apparently emerge again for the next 63 days.

Hudson was vague about what she was doing in the storage unit so late that night, and denied she heard the metal door close.

Taylor suggested she had been sleeping, and further, that perhaps she had been living in the unit. She denied the attorney's supposition.

That night, once it dawned on her, Hudson said, that she had just been locked inside the 30 foot by 10 foot brick-and-metal storage unit -- which had no lights, heat or plumbing -- "It was just total panic.

"I tried to breathe. I had to believe I was not stuck inside."

Only, she was. And being inside the small enclosure, she said, began to take on "a life of its own."

The defense has claimed that during those two months, in the middle of the comings and goings of several other customers attending to their own storage units near where Hudson was stranded, no one reported hearing distress calls from unit no. 611.

It wasn't because she didn't yell out -- she did, she testified -- and claimed that more than one person heard her screams but did not respond.

"I screamed, I banged, I banged, I banged," she said on the witness stand, her four- and five-inch long fingernails clicking together like the legs of a spider crab as she recalled her fear and despair.

She had let her nails grow long since high school, she said. When rescue personnel pulled her from the reeking storage unit on Jan. 9, 2002, her nails were said to be a foot long, according to testimony.

During the ordeal, for sustenance, Hudson said, she rummaged through her belongings, which a month earlier had been tossed out on the street following a foreclosure of her family home.

In the nooks and crannies between clothes and furniture and cardboard boxes, she found a can of tomato sauce here, a small can of mush rooms there, a can of green beans. She opened them with a pair of scissors.

For liquids, she survived on cranberry juice, she said, and white grape juice -- "Dollar Store stuff" -- until she ran out.

"When it rained, I was thirsty," she said. "I said, 'God, why are you being so cruel?' I was so thirsty."

Without heat, she said, "I got freezing cold. There were no blankets, no sheets ... no anything." She wrapped herself in her dead father's clothes.

As for her body wastes, she attempted to store them in tied plastic bags.

"I had nothing, a little alcohol," she said of her fruitless efforts to keep clean. "It was barbaric, but I did it."

Following closing arguments late Friday, Stout instructed jurors to return to his courtroom on Monday to prepare for deliberation.