A man who survived a plane crash when he was 12 years old revealed that he tried to warn his mom after dreaming about the tragedy beforehand.
In 1985, 137 passengers and crew perished when Delta Flight 191 crashed. The plane had encountered a "microburst while attempting to pass through a rain shaft underneath a convective storm cell," per a report published by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Devastatingly, the plane was just 6,000 feet shy of the runway - but burst into flames after colliding with a car on a nearby highway.
Of the 163 passengers on board, 134 died at the scene and a further two passed away soon after as a result of their injuries. The driver of the car that was struck also lost his life.
One unlikely survivor was 12-year-old Richard Laver.
Nearly 40 years on, he has opened up about the tragedy.
In a piece for PEOPLE, the former tennis junior opened up about being "one of the few people in history that has ever been thrown from an exploding jumbo plane and lived".
A young Richard was traveling from his home state of Florida to a junior tennis tournament in San Diego.
He had been traveling with his father - but just a few days before the tragedy that would claim his father's life, he revealed he tried to warn his mother about a "crash".
"I had been having dreams two days prior of a plane crash," Richard - now 51 - said. "I told my mom, Kerry, 'It’s not only a bad feeling. I know it’s going to crash.'
"She said that was a one-in-a-million chance. It was never going to happen."
Richard and his father were the last two passengers to board the plane, he said.
But, his mom's words had not been able to rid him of the feeling that something terrible was going to happen.
"As we flew over Dallas, about halfway into the trip, I looked over to my right and saw a storm cell out the window, dark and foreboding," he said, adding that his father wasn't concerned as he was enjoying a cowboy movie.
"And then the world started to slow down," Richard recalls. "I felt that something could be wrong. I went to the bathroom and threw water on my face, and I looked in the mirror and I knew — right then — that the plane was going to crash. I knew it."
In his piece for PEOPLE, Richard revealed that everybody sitting in his aisle died - except him.
Recalling how he survived, he says he refused to put his seatbelt on after listening to a voice in his head, hiding his lap from flight attendants with a blanket.
Richard then recalled how his 12-year-old body was thrown at nearly 300mph through the devastating explosion and landed in a nearby field.
As he lay their struggling to breathe, with his face burned, he was unable to move or talk - as golf-ball-sized hail stones battered his body.
Fortunately, a driver pulled over in his truck and pulled young Richard to safety, as rainwater had began pooling around his body.
Richard was transferred to Parkland Memorial’s burn unit for treatment along with multiple other survivors who had also been burned by the fire.
Despite the youngster getting better and physically healing from his injuries, the mental trauma he faced dragged him to the depths of anxiety and depression.
That was until he met his now-wife Michelle at a club in Palm Springs where he was a tennis pro. At the time, she was going through a divorce and had three kids of her own, to who he offered tennis lessons and the rest was history.
The couple went on to have a child of their own, a daughter called Katie.
"But soon after, the doctors came to us and said Katie had suffered a stroke in utero," he wrote. "What ended up happening was I was a happy father with a daughter with cerebral palsy. There was one more challenge: She kept losing weight.
"I knew if I lost Katie, that was the final bullet. I was not going to make it. I knew by saving Kate, I would also be saving myself," he added.
Despite his daughter being on 3,000 calories a day, she was not gaining weight, so after lots of research, Laver developed a plant-based formula to aid in her health.
"She went down to 1,600 calories a day on the formula and gained weight," he continued. "Within 30 days, she was off 90% of her medications."
Richard's daughter fortunately turned 18 in July.
This led to him starting his business.
"I started Kate Farms and and it became the No. 1 recommended plant-based formula company in the world, and it's now saved a lot of kids and families from the anguish that we went through," he stated, before adding: "My story is a guy survives a plane crash, saves his daughter’s life and it’s a wonderful life. But I wanted to tell a last story, about a guy who gets lucky. It’s not a beverage company to me. It tells the story about never giving up and believing in yourself."
Laver's story is a truly remarkable one and we're so happy he's found his purpose in life after such a traumatic childhood.
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