Karen Perrin thought she was making a brief bathroom pitstop before leaving her office after a long day and heading home for the night.
Instead, the desperate woman found herself locked inside the restroom without her cell phone, unable to summon help because she was the last one working at 10 p.m. last Friday.
“I thought, ‘Ah! This cannot be,’” Perrin, the wife of former Redskins running back Lonnie Perrin, told ABC News. “It sounds crazy, but I went back into the stall and then washed my hands again hoping to change something.”
Perrin again tried to leave the restroom, but the handle wouldn’t budge.
She tried jiggling it, and then gave it a good kick.
“That’s when it hit me,” she said. “’I’m locked in here. I couldn’t believe it. I felt hopelessness. I felt like I was going to die in there because of the anxiety I was feeling.”
For the next eight hours, she tried everything she could think of, ABC reported, even shoving paper towels under the door in the faint hope someone would spot the movement on surveillance video.
But no one did.
“I probably put 200 towels out. But after nobody came to rescue me I realized I had to do something else,” Perrin said.
She eventually climbed to a ceiling hatchway, but didn’t have the strength to haul herself up.
But she did find a strong metal rod – and began arduously digging her way through the wall so she could try to open the door from the outside – reminiscent of the flick “The Shawshank Redemption,” in which Tim Robbins character tunnels his way out of prison over 20 years using a hammer.
“I thought about ‘Shawshank Redemption,’” said Perrin, referring to the 1994 movie that also starred Morgan Freeman.
After two hours, she broke through and was able to open the door.
“I came undone,” Perrin told the network. “I was crying. I felt like I was escaping a bad dream, like when you have a nightmare and you wake up and your heart is pounding and you realize, ‘Oh, I was just dreaming. Did that just happen. Am I OK?’”
Perrin called her husband – who inexplicably hadn’t alerted authorities or launched a search for his overdue wife.