That is what Ramos, fresh off an impressive rookie season, faced after being abducted Wednesday from his family’s home in the working class neighborhood of Valencia where he grew up. Ramos shook in fear, he recalled in an interview with The Washington Post, prayed to God and wondered if he would live past the ordeal.
“For a few moments,” Ramos said, “I thought I would never see my family and that was something painful, super painful.”
And at the same time, his family huddled together, waiting for a ransom demand, and discussing what steps to take with investigators and a Major League Baseball security consultant well-versed in hostage negotiations. They tried to block out a cold, hard fact all of them were conscious of: that hostages in this crime-ridden country disappear for months and, sometimes, forever.
“There were moments when the pressure would get to me, and I felt like collapsing,” said Ramos’s mother, Maria Campos, 45. She would cry, she said, and then see all the support she had around her, her children, Ramos’s father, Abraham Ramos, and other relatives.
A fervent evangelist, she said she sought a higher power.
“Then, I would get the strength,” she said shortly past midnight Saturday morning, as she awaited the arrival of her second son.
‘They took Wilson’
The story of how Ramos was abducted and then rescued in what appeared to be a textbook-perfect operation by President Hugo Chavez’s government has gripped this country, which is passionate about baseball and the ballplayers who rise to the top of the profession and make it to the big leagues.
Ramos, a right-handed batter who had hit .267 with 15 home runs and had a .438 slugging percentage, is one of the hometown heroes who return to play in this country’s storied winter league. With only a week to go before his debut with the Aragua Tigers, who play in nearby Maracay, Ramos and his family had been outside the house, enjoying a cool evening after the sun had settled, when a mysterious SUV circled by.
Campos said she had gone to the kitchen, to finish preparing dinner for her son, who had wanted to eat a Venezuelan specialty that is hard to find in Washington, corn cakes filled with meat.
“I went inside and in the moment I left, it happened,” she said. “It was a question of seconds.”
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