An Arizona bride-to-be says she was stabbed in the neck by her fiancé just weeks before their wedding — and was only saved by her “very, very brave” eldest daughter calling 911.
Emily Byles, a 30-year-old mom of two, told Fox10 Phoenix that she had recently moved to Glendale to be with beau Zachary Velasquez before he attacked her with scissors on Oct. 5, a month before their planned nuptials.
“He wasn’t trying to just hurt me. He was trying to end my life,” she insisted, with photos showing her in a hospital with two black eyes, a neck brace and cuts across her face and neck.
“I was stabbed multiple times, my artery was cut, and I was severely beaten. I was not supposed to survive, but by God’s grace I did,” Byles also detailed in an online fundraiser.
Byles told cops that her groom-to-be had been using methamphetamine and threateningly told “her he was a prophet and tried to kill her in order to save her,” according to People Magazine.
Byles was hit in the head dozens of times and didn’t immediately realize she’d been stabbed.
“I felt like maybe I died because it was like an out-of-body experience of going past earth and past heaven,” Byles told Fox10, adding that she was “completely mortified that someone that says he loves me and would protect me would just literally try to murder me.”
Byles’ two daughters were also threatened in the ferocious attack — that only ended when the eldest, age 11, called 911.
“She’s very, very brave, and I couldn’t imagine what she’s going through,” Byles told the station.
Responding cops “forced entry into the bedroom” after hearing Byles’ cries, and found her “laying down on her back covered in blood,” according to a probable cause statement obtained by People.
“The victim advised officers the defendant was trying to kill her,” the statement said.
Velasquez has been charged with aggravated assault.
He admitted to cops that he punched his fiancée and put her in a chokehold — but claimed it was all in self-defense, according to People, which did not elaborate on how he claimed he was threatened.
Byles wrote on a fundraising site that she was staying with a friend while she healed and her daughters were staying out of town with her sister because their home had become “unlivable,” with “too much blood to clean up.”
“My fiancé, the person who attacked me, is now in jail, but my children and I are still living with the trauma of what happened,” she wrote.
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