Texas Grandmother Tossed Into Well Survives

May 23, 2008 &#151 -- She may be the bravest grandmother in the toughest town in Texas.

Last week, in a place called Gun Barrel, Texas, a 63-year old woman was abducted from her home near midnight by a violent convicted sex offender who allegedly beat her with the barrel of a gun, dragged her into the woods and presented her with a nightmarish trio of choices, she told ABC News.

He told her he could strangle her, shoot her or toss her down a concrete well in the woods, she said. Before she could choose, she felt herself tumbling headlong into a dank, underground well that opened like a cistern at its base 20 feet beneath the ground.

The woman spent 16 hours in putrid water at the bottom of the well before her frantic family pieced together the fragmented clues to her disappearance and tracked her to the watery, underground prison.

"I didn't think I was going to be found. I was just praying I would," the woman said during an interview conducted in shadow for "Good Morning America" today.

Police say she was also sexually assaulted and ABC News does not identify sex assault victims.

"They said I was down there for 15 hours,'' the battered and still bewildered woman said late Thursday. "I am not sure."

Joshua James Cannon, 18, who had registered as a sex offender with county officials just two days before the alleged abduction, was arrested and charged with a battery of felonies after authorities found him driving around in the woman's car with a 15-year-old, according to the Tyler Morning Telegraph.

A police official with the Henderson County Sheriff's Department could not immediately confirm the charges against Cannon, but the newspaper reported that he was charged with aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, robbery and possession of a firearm by a felon. The woman's family has said the area where she lives has been plagued by violent crime for years.