It’s difficult to imagine what was more frustrating for the North Carolina man trapped in a crowded storage unit for nearly a week.
Was it the fact his girlfriend, 52-year-old Robin Deaton, locked him inside the facility, or that he spent several days looking in vain for the cellphone which eventually led to his freedom?
On Monday, Feb. 24, Union County, North Carolina, officials received a 911 call from Unit 43 of the Cooper Storage Facility in the town of Monroe.
“I’ve been locked in a storage unit for about a week now, and I’ve just now found my phone,” Gary Oxendine said. “My girlfriend locked me in here. She doubled locked my lock, and I don’t know how she put me in here but she put me in here.”
Asked whether he needed emergency services, the man responded, “I just need (to get) out of here.”
“I just can’t breathe,” he said. “I haven’t had nothing to drink or anything.”
Police arrived to rescue the extremely dehydrated man and began to piece together an incident one lieutenant called “bizarre.”
“In 15 years, I’ve not seen anybody who has been locked in a storage unit,” said Monroe Police Department lieutenant and public information officer Morgan Malone.
Two days later, Deaton was arrested, charged with attempted murder and kidnapping. She had locked her boyfriend in the storage unit on Feb. 20 without food or water, according to the police report.
The couple had been fighting when Deaton allegedly convinced the boyfriend to crawl to the back of the unit to grab something for her, then slammed the door shut. “This is what you get,” she told him.
“The storage unit was described to me as being a hoarder’s paradise,” Malone added, according to CBS affiliate WBTV. “As soon as the officers opened up the door, things started falling out. The further they opened it, more stuff fell out.”
Besides having little room to move, the unit was pitch black inside, which explains why it took the man so long to find his phone. He didn’t have cell service, so his phone never emitted light or sound.
The owner of Cooper Storage said daily property checks revealed no signs of distress, and security footage didn’t capture any suspicious activity.
The situation could’ve easily turned fatal, Malone said.
“(The man) had no food, no water,” he said. “If we had been in the heat of the summer, or the super cold of the winter, this would be a whole different story. I do think this is an important reminder that men can also be victims of domestic abuse.”
However, Oxendine has since denied accusations that his girlfriend purposefully locked him in the storage unit, telling WSOC that the charges against Deaton are a mistake.
“She did not lure me into the back of a unit for nothing. All this is just a bunch of bull crap,” Oxendine said hours after Deaton was arrested. “They need to get their stuff right. It’s just a bunch of bogus charges.”
Oxendine claims that Deaton left to get the couple some food, and while she was gone, he fell asleep in the unit. When Deaton returned, she yelled for him, and when he didn’t respond, she locked the unit, assuming he’d left.
“She thought I had gone with an ex-girlfriend. That’s what it all boils down to, and I hadn’t. She said she came the next day, but I sleep hard and I fell asleep. I had been up working for a couple days,” Oxendine said, adding that the cell service was limited in the unit, so he could not call Deaton, but the phone allowed him to dial 911.
