I climbed down a cliff covered in blood with a broken arm to save Jake but it was too late, says Yazmin Oukhellou
YAZMIN Oukhellou has revealed the devastating moment she desperately tried to save her boyfriend Jake McLean's life after their horror car crash.
After managing to scramble to safety with a severely injured arm, the Towie star raised the alarm and then returned to their crushed car.
But bravely recalling the horrendous accident in Turkey, Yazmin was unable to find Jake's pulse.
The 33-year-old was declared dead by medics a short while later.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Yazmin, 28, said: "I climbed back down and tried to check his pulse but I couldn’t feel anything and then the ambulance came and they weren’t really helping him – they were helping me I was like please can you just help him and they were like, ‘No, no, no he is fine. We just need to take him to another hospital."
She added: “I think they just knew, but for me even now I still feel like it’s not real. I still feel like I’m just waiting to wake up from a nightmare and it’s just something that never happens.”
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Yazmin and Jake had been on a night out with friends in Bodrum when their Mercedes careered 70ft over a cliff as they headed to a pal's villa.
The TV star had nodded off in the passenger seat while Jake drove but she suddenly awoke to the vehicle tumbling down the mountain side.
"We were just tumbling for what seemed like forever. It felt like I was going round in a washing machine — just round and round," Yazmin recalled.
“The car was upside down. It had an open sunroof and my right arm was just stuck behind my back and under the folded back of the car roof.
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“I tried to honk the horn with my foot and I couldn’t do it.”
Yazmin did not know it at the time, but the crash had opened an artery. She was then faced with the decision of 'snapping her arm' or 'bleeding to death'.
She said: "In my head I told myself, ‘OK, he’s just unconscious, I’m alive so he must be alive’.
“I didn’t want to admit it to myself that he could be dead.
“So I thought, ‘Right, I can either lay still and bleed to death, or snap my own arm to try to save us — I had no choice.
“So I somehow snapped my arm through pure adrenaline and panic."
Yazmin clambered back up to the roadside while 'holding her arm together' and managed to alert the attention of a man walking his dog in the dark with a flashlight.
She was soon whisked to hospital where she was told by doctors she was an "angel" to have survived the accident.
“The doctors called me an angel, a miracle, because it’s a notorious spot and people have never survived," Yazmin said. "Now I’m just wondering how the hell did my partner die while I’ve survived? It’s made me look at life totally differently."
Yazmin will be going for intensive therapy sessions as she struggles to come to terms with what happened.
The grief and shock have left her needing to sleep side-by-side with her mum Lisa, who had flown out to Turkey immediately after the tragedy to be by her daughter’s hospital bedside.
Yazmin added: “For now, I just need to focus on getting well again and dealing with what has happened.
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“Jake is the only person I have ever felt a love like that for and I think for me it’s going to be very, very difficult to get over this.
“This will stay with me for life. But for me, I loved him so hard and that’s why I travelled across the world to be with him.”
