The Sunday morning after Christmas, 16-year-old Jai Breisch woke to the sound of his sister Kali's frantic screaming.
"I thought it was a big bug or something because she is scared of spiders so I really didn't want to wake up," he said.
The Utah teen woke up enough to see his sister pointing to the window. And then he saw the wave — two or three stories high.
Water exploded into their room in Thailand's Khao Lak resort area and violently picked up the brother and sister.
"Everywhere there was white," Jai said. "It felt like being in a washing machine with bricks, pool balls, razor blades and glass."
During a news conference Monday in Salt Lake City, the family's first since returning to Utah, Jai explained how he tried to grab something stable, but he was moving so fast it was like trying to grab a stop sign while inside a moving car.
When he was finally able to stand, Jai had been taken three quarters of a mile inland. He could barely move his arm, he was bleeding and had cuts and bruises everywhere. And there was no sign of 15-year-old Kali.
Some Thais found Jai and took him to an ambulance. He had a separated shoulder and a deep gash near his knee. Add those injuries to the four fractured bones in his neck, suffered in an October car accident, and he was in pretty bad shape.
But at least he was alive. For three days, he thought his entire family had been killed. He had no clothes, no passport, no money and no family. Flashbacks of the wave kept him awake for days and later haunted his sleep at a Bangkok hospital. He would go to sleep and see the wave and then wake up to screams and sirens at the hospital.
Jai had survived the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean quake and tsunami that killed an estimated 150,000 people and left millions homeless.
Lying in the hospital, he devoted his will to one thing.
"I just had to focus," Jai said, "on breathing."
The Sunday morning the tsunami hit, the rest of Jai's family — father, Stuart; sister, Shonti; and Stuart's fiancee, Sally Nelson — had gone scuba diving. Because of his neck injury, Jai stayed at the resort. Kali chose to stay with her brother.
On a boat miles from shore, Stuart, Sally and Shonti were unaware of the tsunami and the disaster befalling Jai and Kali.
"The boat just gently went up and up and back down a couple of times," Stuart said. "That was our experience with the tsunami."
The Breisch family returned to Utah on Saturday after a grueling two weeks in Thailand, searching for Kali. Just 48 hours after their return, the family held a nearly two-hour press conference Monday to tell their story — a story Stuart hopes can help others connect with the tragedy.
Stuart said it wasn't until well after the tsunami hit that they realized something was terribly wrong. Their scuba venture had ended early due to rough waters that had dangerously tossed the divers around in the water.
Two miles away from the beach on their way back, they started spotting debris — boards, an uprooted tree, a refrigerator, a dog and then a woman.
"We picked up every person that we could find in the water that was alive," Stuart said. "Then we get to the beach and are told to run for our lives, in 40 minutes another wave is coming."
Back at Khao Lak, the Breisch family found utter devastation. Everything was gone.
"I just thought, how could it be possible for anybody, any living thing, to survive this — there is no other conclusion you could make," Stuart said.
To their relief, they eventually found Jai in the Bangkok hospital.
But all they found of Kali were a swimsuit and snakeskin shoes she had persuaded her father to buy.
"She was so excited about those shoes. 'It's snakeskin, Dad, they're gorgeous,' " Stuart said, quoting his daughter. But they continued searching.
Sally went to Bangkok to be with Jai, who'd had multiple surgeries and was undergoing painful debridement for an infection that had penetrated his leg wound and gotten into the joint.
Stuart and Shonti spent their days searching through debris, frequenting temples that had become makeshift morgues with "football fields of coffins."
Days later in Bangkok, "Good Morning America" made contact with the family, and they took the TV crew back to Khao Lak. There, while the crew was filming, Shonti found a photo of Kali's body.
It came with a number linking it to a body, but it had been misnumbered. So the family returned to Utah without Kali — only a photo. But with the help of the American Embassy in Thailand, relief workers and others, the family is confident of finding her body.
"This was an incredibly traumatic experience for each of us. . . . Even after living it, I can't even imagine that was real — it had to have been a dream," Stuart said. "I can't even wrap words around it — it doesn't even come close to doing justice to it, but it does not serve me or my family to be asked to go back into the story again and again and again."
"We are grieving. We need our solitude to do that," Sally said. "We appreciate all of the caring, but we would really like our privacy."
Stuart said it would have been easy to turn their backs on Bangkok. But instead, they chose to honor it, he said.
After dating for more than four years, Stuart and Sally were married in a Buddhist ceremony in Bangkok last Friday before leaving the tsunami-devastated area.
"This isn't just about our loss or about Kali. . . . This is a worldwide event that shook the earth," Stuart said. "I hope it's an opportunity for the world to come together and own the fact that we all share this planet, we're all the same, we're all vulnerable, life is precious."
E-mail: terickson@desnews.com