PHOTOSDuane Chapman & Family Share Emotional Days Before Beth Chapman’s Death
Duane Chapman and his family are recalling the most difficult experience of their lives — the death of wife and mother Beth Chapman. Beth was diagnosed with stage II throat cancer in September 2017 and died on June 26. She was 51.
The emotional home footage showed Duane’s, 66, daughters—Lyssa, Bonnie, and Cecily—at a loss for words hours after their mom’s passing. “It feels lie it’s not real,” says Lysaa, 32, who’s one of Duane’s children from his third wife Lyssa Brittain. “We’ve prepared for this for a while,” Duane told her. “I don’t care how much you prepare, it tough.”
In the clip, Duane opened up his late wife's usual morning routine. “It’s about 6 a.m. in Hawaii, Honolulu. At 5:30 something, beth usually gets up every day to hit Koko Head mountain here with the family, some of her girls and her dog, and today at that time Beth’s hie was the stairway to heaven,” Duane told cameras.
The clip, then, flashed back five days prior to when things quickly took a turn for Beth and her family. “We were flying from Colorado and Beth started feeling not so good. She took a steroid pill that they gave her and her breathing got really raspy and really bad. I had to follow her around,” Duane told cameramen. “I had to follow her around. If I couldn’t hear her breathing I was like ‘Where is she?’”
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Duane, nicknamed “Dog The Bounty Hunter,” told cameras that his wife was sitting in the bathroom when suddenly she stood up and told him that she couldn’t breathe. “She put her hands against the wall and started bouncing trying to get air,” he said. “She want straight back, I saw her eyes roll back in her head and she fell into my arms. All I kept thinking was, ‘I have to breathe the breath of life back in her because I told her I wasn’t going to let her die.’ And so she didn’t, she took a big suction of air and I was like, ‘Cecilly, call 911 right now.'”
“I just hear my dad yell, ‘Everybody get out of the house. Cecily, get here right now,'” an emotional Cecily, 26, said. Noting, “You kind of just know.”
Duane broke the devastating news via Twitter. “It’s 5:32 in Hawaii, this is the time she would wake up to go hike Koko Head mountain,” he wrote. “Only today, she hiked the stairway to heaven. WE all love you, Beth. See you on the other side.”
