Michele Messer is a beautiful 30-year-old woman from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. When she asked her boyfriend to come over to talk about their relationship, she had no idea how he would react.
She had been with Chris Campbell for about eight months, but as she explained to him that evening, things weren’t working the way she had hoped and she had decided they should go their separate ways. Chris flew into a violent rage.
“He pushed me up against the wall… his face was right to my face, like we were nose to nose and he started screaming at me,” Michele recalled. Fearing for her life, she warned him that she was going to call the police.
Chris became threatening and told her, “If you call the police, then I am gonna f**k you up!” Then he left her apartment.
Weeks later Michele ran into Chris in a local restaurant. He asked her to come out to his car so they could talk. Michele agreed and got into the passenger’s seat. But it was quickly clear that Chris didn’t want to have an innocent discussion. “As soon as I shut my door he locked it and went absolutely ballistic. He started punching me everywhere,” Michele remembered. She tried to protect herself as best she could, but Chris simply overpowered her.
And then came the horrific moment that Michelle will never forget. “I felt him on top of me and I felt his teeth come down on my nose.”
The intense pain and loss of blood left Michele in a state of shock and she briefly lost consciousness. When she came to, she was confused and asked Chris had happened. With a cold, calm voice he answered, “I bit your nose off.” Michele could hardly believe her ears, but when she reached up to her face she realized he wasn’t lying. There was blood everywhere. Before Michele knew it, Chris then began to choke her. She somehow mustered the strength to open the car door and fell to the ground. Fortunately, someone passing by saw this and called 911.
Michele next remembers waking up in the hospital. She had lost a lot of blood, but the real shock came when she looked in the mirror. “I was completely disfigured. I did not have a nose. I just lost it. I cried and I cried and I cried. Who’s gonna want a girl with no nose?”
When Dr. Andrew Ordon of the television show “The Doctors” learned of Michele’s case, he agreed to perform plastic surgery to reconstruct her nose. The reconstruction required several operations over a period of weeks. The complicated procedure involved using skin from Michele’s forehead to remodel her nostrils.
When the surgery was complete, Michele was impressed. “They gave me my nose back. I feel beautiful again. It’s nice to walk around and not scare anyone.”
Chris Campbell was charged with attempted murder. He took a plea bargain and pled guilty to assault of a high and aggravated nature, receiving a 15 year sentence. He also pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter in a separate case and the two sentences together will run 20 years.
Thankfully, this dark time in Michele’s life is behind her. She has been left with both emotional and physical scars but is grateful for those who helped bring her attacker to justice and the reconstructive surgery that has restored her self-worth. “They changed my life and made it so I feel good about myself and confident,” she said.
