The California mom who vanished while jogging was horribly beaten and branded by her abductors, her husband revealed on Tuesday.
Keith Papini admitted that he “was filled with so much relief and revulsion at once’’ when he first saw his battered and emaciated wife, Sherri, again.
“The officers warned me to brace myself. My first sight was my wife in a hospital bed, her face covered in bruises ranging from yellow to black because of repeated beatings, the bridge of her nose broken,’’ Papini recalled.
“Her now-emaciated body of 87 pounds was covered in multicolored bruises, severe burns, red rashes and chain markings,’’ the husband wrote in a lengthy statement to ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“Her signature long, blond hair had been chopped off. She has been branded, and I could feel the rise of her scabs under my fingers.’’
Papani said the 34-year-old mother of two had just been “thrown from a vehicle with a chain around her waist, attached to her wrists and a bag over her head.
“The same bag she used to flag someone down once she was able to free one of her hands,’’ he said.
Sherri Papini was discovered by a motorist on Interstate 5 near a rural road in outside of Sacramento on Thanksgiving Day, three weeks after she disappeared while jogging near her home in Mountain Gate — 140 miles away.
She told police she had been abducted by two armed Hispanic women in a dark-colored SUV.
Another woman said that two days before Papini was found, she saw a lady closely resembling the mom sitting in a truck at a rest stop near Redding, Calif.
After two also in the truck went inside the rest stop, witness Christine Everson went up to the blonde and said, “You look like that woman who was abducted here in Redding. Are you OK?” she told the Daily Mail. ‘She never answered me. She didn’t answer yes. She didn’t answer no. She just looked at me,’’ Everson recalled.
“And I said, ‘Are you being held against your will? Do you need me to call 911 right now?’ And again she didn’t answer.”
Everson said, “Sex trafficking in this area is getting very big, so I was thinking that’s what’s happening here.
“I said, ‘I’d be willing to meet you in there, and we can make arrangements for you if you are being trafficked, or there is a phone number in there and we have safe houses here in Redding.’
“She said, ‘Thanks.’ That’s all she said to me and put her head down.’ ”
Everson said she called the cops about five minutes after the truck left and passed along its license-plate number and description.
Sherri Papini has told police that the two Hispanic women who abducted her were the ones who later dumped her on I-5.
In a bizarre twist, the Mail reported that a 2003 blog posting by a person identifying herself as Sherri Graeff — Sherri Papini’s maiden name — ripped Latinos while saying she was “proud’’ to be white.
Authorities are now investigating where there are any possible links between the posting and Sherri Papini’s disappearance.
The skeletal mom, who shed nearly 20 pounds from her 105-pound frame, told authorities that after she was tossed from the SUV, she limped to a nearby church but no one was there.
She then made it back to the highway, where she flagged down the passer-by.
Sherri Papini was quickly whisked to an undisclosed Northern California hospital, where she was reunited with her husband and other relatives.
“My reaction was one of extreme happiness and overwhelming nausea, as my eyes and hands scanned her body,’’ Keith Papini said. “My Sherri suffered tremendously, and all the visions swirling in your heads of her appearance, I assure you, are not as graphic and gruesome as the reality.”
The mom’s horrific condition only added to the bizarre mystery of the case.
Her husband slammed the media for having a voracious appetite for the “gory details,” although his description of first seeing her was the most graphic account made public to date.
He also slammed online trolls for suggesting that his wife’s kidnapping was a “hoax.”
“Rumors, assumptions, lies and hate have been both exhausting and disgusting. Those people should be ashamed of their malicious, subhuman behavior,” the husband wrote in his statement.
“We are not going to allow those people to take away our spirit, love or rejoice in our girl found alive and home where she belongs,” he said.
“I understand people want the story, pictures, proof that this was not some sort of hoax, plan to gain money or some fabricated race war.
“I do not see a purpose in addressing each preposterous lie.”
Investigators interviewed Papini in the hospital, but she couldn’t provide a detailed description of her captors, leading some to believe that she was blindfolded.
Cops have not confirmed that information.
Meanwhile, Keith Papini said that while it has been nearly unbearable for him during his wife’s abduction, it’s nothing compared to what she has had to endure.
“The mental prison I was in over the past three weeks was shattered when my questions of my wife’s reality became known,’’ said the husband, who has two children, ages 2 and 4, with his wife.
“Ultimately, it was Sherri’s will to survive that brought her home.”