Sherri Papini’s Husband Keith Recalls Their First Phone Call: ‘I Love You, Oh my God, You’re Here’
Keith Papini remembers the first words he exchanged with his wife Sherri, the California mom who mysteriously vanished for three weeks before being found along a rural road on Thanksgiving Day.
When he got the call from a California Highway Patrol officer, he said in an interview with 20/20‘s Matt Gutman, “It was my wife screaming in the background, yelling my name.”
He added that he remembered thinking, “I already know it’s her. I can tell her voice.”
Papini was allegedly kidnapped while out for a jog on Nov. 2. She was found around 4:30 a.m. last Thursday in Yolo County — about 150 miles south of her Redding home, where she was last seen.
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Of speaking to Sherri directly, Keith said, “I get the phone and, , ‘Oh my God, honey.’ And of course she’s screaming.”
He added, “It’s very emotional. And, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, Oh my God, you’re here. You’re back. Where are you?’ And then the phone gets taken away from her. Like, super quick.”
“I’m panicked but I’m happy because at this point this is the first time I’ve heard her voice,” he added. “I know she’s alive.”
Papini also recounted the moment he told the couple’s son about finding Sherri.
“I sat him down, and I was on my knees and he was standing up,” Papini said. “And I said, ‘You know what, buddy? I found mom,’ and he got the biggest grin and he started, like, ‘Where is she?’”
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Papini has described the brutal condition she was in the first time he saw her after her release by her captors.
“My first sight was my wife in a hospital bed. Her face covered in bruises ranging from yellow to black because of her repeated beatings. The bridge of her nose broken,” Keith Papini wrote in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. “She has been branded and I could feel the rise of her scabs under my fingers.”
He added that Papini weighed only 87 lbs. and her long, blonde hair had been chopped off. He wrote that Sherri had been thrown from a vehicle with a chain around her waist – which was also attached to her wrists – and a bag over her head.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko has said that Papini told police her captors were two adult Hispanic women, armed with a handgun and driving a dark colored SUV, and that authorities “currently have no reason to disbelieve Sherri Papini’s story.”
The motive behind the alleged kidnapping is still unclear as authorities continue to investigate.
The full interview featuring Keith Papini airs on ABC’s 20/20 Friday, Dec. 2 at 10 p.m. ET.
