Still terrified the unknown attacker might return, Diane moved Brittani and two of her sisters to Texas, where they found her an intense rehabilitation program. Through three tense months, the family took turns sitting at her bedside until doctors told the family it looked like Brittani would survive.įive months after the attack, she was released from the hospital.
“We talked to her and she’d blink her eyes and smile, but we knew at that point, there was a lot of paralysis,” her mom, Diane, said. Brittani’s ear canal had been crushed, leaving her deaf in one ear and her optic nerve was severed during the violent blows to her head. While in the ICU, a portion of her brain was removed and she fought a battle with meningitis.
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Watch More 'Dateline' Episodes In Our Free Appīack at the hospital, Brittani’s family was terrified the attacker would strike again and the teen was admitted to the hospital under an assumed name. “Really, at this point, we had no suspect at all, so everybody is,” Morales said. Police also considered whether the attacker may have had a connection to Brittani’s brother or one of her five sisters - yet nothing turned up any promising leads. Morales delved into Brittani’s social life, checking out a guy she had sort of been dating at the time, friends, and those who may have interacted with the teen at her job working at a sunglass kiosk at the Cottonwood Mall. “It seemed to me at the time that we were looking at somebody that either knew Brittani or knew somebody in the family or there was something, there’s more of a connection.” Without an obvious suspect in the case, Morales decided to re-examine Brittani’s life in the months leading up to the brutal attack. Morales believed it could be the clue to break open the case, but after uploading the DNA into the national CODIS database, a database run by the FBI of DNA profiles gathered from across the country, there were no hits. After he jumped out of the dining room window, the attacker had also left behind his DNA in one small droplet of blood found on a shard of glass from the broken window. The attacker had left behind a bloody shovel, knife, and roll of duct tape, but he had also unintentionally left behind another critical clue. “Once we were able to go inside, you could see it was pretty violent,” he told “Dateline” reporter Andrea Canning. An unknown attacker had hit Brittani so hard with a shovel it crushed the left part of her skull.
11, 2008.Īlbuquerque Police Detective Jason Morales was shocked by the “very brutal” nature of the attack. She was rushed to a local hospital, where Diane says doctors “didn’t think she’d survive,” as investigators converged on the scene of the usually quiet Albuquerque neighborhood on Sept. The attacker was gone - fleeing through a dining room window - but Brittani, a once vibrant and bubbly teenager, lay on the ground fighting for her life. Someone passing by the home heard her and bravely decided to run into the home. Terrified, Diane ran from the house screaming. “I see a person I’ve never seen before in my house and he’s holding a shovel and he walks through my living room, drops the shovel and walks through the dining room and around to the kitchen, and I am looking at him and he tells me I’m next, while he’s reaching for a butcher knife,” Diane recalled to “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered,” airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen. Diane Marcell was looking forward to having lunch with her 17-year-old daughter, Brittani - when she opened the door to the family’s Albuquerque home and made a grisly discovery.īrittani was lying on the floor, covered in blood.
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