Dominic's Near-Death Experience: Shot Twice and Sent to Hell

The Streets Became His Father

Dominic's story begins in Chicago, in the Uptown area, a district with half a million people packed into a single neighborhood. He joined a gang between the ages of 12 and 13. "I had a rough life," he says. "Chicago was a hard place to grow up. My father wasn't around, unfortunately, so the streets became my father."

Growing up without guidance, Dominic absorbed the influences around him. Older guys in the gang became his role models. Money, power, respect. The gang culture seemed righteous because it was all he knew, all that was programmed into his community. Years passed and he "pretty much mastered the craft, so to speak, of the streets," he says. He became hardened. But even then, something whispered to him. The Holy Spirit, he believes now, would warn him in certain places, tell him he shouldn't be there. He didn't listen. Humans want to please the flesh first.

He gave his life to the gang. He considered them "like a family" to him. And then they stabbed him in the back.

The Setup

Around 2009, Dominic started noticing something was off. A guy kept following him. In a district with 500,000 people, running into the same person three times in an hour is impossible unless they're tracking you. Dominic told his friend. His friend said he was paranoid, nobody was thinking about him, he wasn't "big time like that." But Dominic had a weird feeling in his gut.

The third time he saw the man, he decided to confront him. As Dominic approached, the man asked, "Do you have a light, a lighter?" Dominic started digging in his pocket. He was about to say "sir" when all of a sudden he saw it: a bright green flash.

"I smelled sulfur," Dominic says. "It smelled like burning matches." He looked up. The guy looked at him with a smirk, "kind of like an evil grin, like 'I got you.'" It was so evil. Everything moved in slow motion. Dominic fell backward.

Falling Into the Darkness

When he fell backward, "everything went blank, dark, but this kind of darkness is not a darkness that you see on Earth," Dominic says. "This darkness is alive. It's a gripping darkness." He tries to explain: you could blindfold yourself, put yourself underground, blindfold yourself again, and it still wouldn't compare. There's a spiritual component to this darkness.

The weirdest part? When he fell backward, he instantly started falling forward. Face first. That was the spiritual aspect. He was falling faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Faster than that.

The further he fell, the more he felt like he was "getting stripped of everything" he knew. Hope. Love. Fellowship. Patience. Everything God had given him that he'd taken for granted was being pulled away. He was getting more and more afraid. But this wasn't earthly fear. It was a different fear, one you have to experience to understand.

As he fell, he heard laughter around him. Giggling, like little kids. But the laugh itself was demonic. He felt it. "Whatever was laughing at me hated me," Dominic says, "hated me more than anything you can even describe."

Then came the smell. "People don't realize when you leave the physical body you still have your five senses," he explains. "You still have them, but they're upgraded and modified. Times a million." The smell was so bad that a thousand corpses and dead animals would smell like fresh air compared to what he encountered in hell.

As he fell, he saw a pinpoint of light getting bigger and bigger. That's when it hit him: "I knew I was going to hell." He'd thought hell was a fairy tale, a scare tactic used by religions. But now he knew. Time doesn't exist in eternity the way it exists here, so all the time he was falling, he had time to know. To understand.

Then he heard the screams of the people. Billions, hundreds of millions of billions of people, he thought. Screaming. Gut-wrenching screams. He could feel them in his gut, in his soul. Suffering. Blasphemous things being yelled. People begging for one more chance. In the spirit, you can hear a thousand noises at once and decipher each one distinctly.

Entering the Portal

The portal looked like an old cave, an ancient cave system. That's when he felt the heat. Looking back, he thinks it was probably already hot, but he'd been so shocked and terrified by everything else that he didn't notice until he entered the first portion of the portal.

The heat hit him on top of everything. Here on Earth, our nervous system lets us feel things separately. You get poked in the back, you feel it in that spot. But there, you feel everything simultaneously. All at once. Pain everywhere. Because he was in his spirit body now.

The heat had a spiritual component. It wasn't like burning your finger here. He tries to put it on a temperature scale: 12,000 degrees and up. Nothing physical in the flesh could withstand that.

As he entered the portal, he heard the yells. It was overwhelming. By the time he got to the bottom, he just knew he was in hell.

The Bottom

When he hit the bottom, he didn't feel anything at first. He wonders now if the Lord softened the blow. When he raised his eyes, he felt like he hadn't eaten for months. He had no strength. He couldn't breathe. It was horrible. A feeling of nothing.

The only thing that kept coming to his mind was everything he'd taken for granted. Movement. A drink of water. The ability to move his arms freely. The ability to breathe. He knew it came from God. He knew he'd taken it all for granted.

He looked around. It was dark, but the flames were emitting so high from vents in the rocks that he could see. And somehow, for some reason, he knew he was still here on Earth. He wasn't in outer space. He was in a different dimension, but still on Earth. "The Lord is right," he says. "Hell is a place on Earth. The scriptures are right. It is here on Earth. It's just a different dimension."

The Demons and the Pits

As the flames came up and illuminated the space, the first thing he noticed were "these demons, things". "They're the most grotesque, smelliest... horror. Hollywood can't even get close to how these things look," Dominic says. They were so deformed. They had legs and twisted arms. They had a reptilian look, and their eyes were glowing yellow. Some eyes were red. Some were 13 feet tall. Some were tiny.

They were everywhere. Bugs. Spiders. Everything. But what really caught his attention were the pits. One demon glanced at him and started laughing. Down in the pits were just people.

As he looked around and the flames illuminated the space, he saw "hundreds of thousands of pits, and within each pit, thousands of people". Around the pits were nothing but these grotesque reptilian things, making sure people didn't crawl out. Some people looked like bones. Some had flesh hanging off, which seems incomprehensible. But the thing is, you regenerate. Your arm falls off, it grows right back so you can be tortured again. It's a place of pure torture. No relief.

One demon, about eight feet tall, looked at him. Then Dominic remembers thousands of maggots, worms, thick as soda cans. Not like regular maggots. They started to chew at his feet. When he looked down, there were hundreds of them, making a mound around him up to his knees.

But that was the least of his worries. Something picked him up from the back of his head and flung him. He had no energy, no strength. He couldn't even get up when he was lying down. But now he realizes, in hindsight, that the Lord was with him. These demons wanted to attack him, wanted to rip him apart. He could feel the hatred they had for mankind. "It is beyond anything. It is beyond," he says. "You can feel it's ancient. You can feel it is powerful."

"These demons feed off our depression, they feed off our anxiety, they feed off our aggression, they feed off our hate," Dominic explains. "They just feed off of us." That's why they cause situations in the background. They don't have the power to make us do things, but they have the power to influence situations. The hatred they have for us would make you love all mankind and stick together against these beings.

Knowing Why They're There

As he stood there, barely able to get up, he thinks the Lord showed him the whole section. Hell has many sections. It was illuminated for him so he could see everything. "The tortures... wow. I mean, it is beyond the stretch of your imagination," he says.

People ask why God would let that happen, why God sent people there. They blame God. They never blame the enemy for anything when they were here on Earth. But one thing Dominic noticed: when you're in hell, in eternity, in the spirit body, you can look at a person inside hell and you know why they're there. Instantaneously. You just know.

He saw people there for unforgiveness. People who thought they were the best in the church, saying "Why did you do this to me?" He saw pastors there. He saw teenagers, pre-teens in hell.

The first lady he saw getting tortured individually: two demons, reptile things, were laughing. They stretched her mouth so far back it looked like they could rip her jaws open. They were pouring lava down her throat, sticking her throat with spears and ancient-looking rusty daggers. They were getting a kick out of it. She turned to bone, broke up, then regenerated. They'd do it all over again. They were taking turns, inviting other demonic spirits. They were laughing, having fun torturing this lady.

When Dominic looked at her, he already knew why she was there. She was a gossiper. She gossiped about people. She got many people's lives ruined because of her tongue. And she was an alcoholic.

There was a theme in hell, he noticed. People commit sins on a wide spectrum, but the one that sticks out the most is the one that's going to be rectified in hell. The sin you maximize, that's what you experience. Over and over and over.

He saw a young lady. Demons were literally taking turns having sex with this woman. Not regular sexual intercourse. Beyond anything he can describe. She was very promiscuous when she was on Earth. They were torturing her in ways he can't even imagine.

"The biggest sins that you have... everything counts," Dominic says. "It's not God our Father up there taking the list. The Bible says the flesh will testify against itself. Your flesh testifies against you. Your flesh, your desires. That's why he always tells us to get away from pleasing our own flesh, because we're going to put ourselves there."

"The Lord cries. The Lord's heart aches for us," he says. "Every one of us that go to hell. He does not want that. He does not want that for us at all. It really tears him apart to see us in that predicament."

The Cells

That was only one section. Dominic thought that was it. But no. He thinks the Lord was with him. He never saw the Lord's face, but he knew someone was there, like in a dream where you can't see the person but you know they're standing with you. The Lord was directing him, protecting him, because these things wanted to eat him and tear him apart.

When you move in hell, there's no walking around. When the Lord shows you, it's instantaneous. Like teleportation.

He teleported to another part of hell. He saw cells. He grew up in skyscrapers in Uptown Chicago, on the 16th floor. These cells were taller than that. They had to be 50 stories tall. Row after row, as far as the eye could see. Old bar cells. And there were people in them.

Some looked like skeletons. Some were burned to a crisp. They were cursing God. They were very angry. There was no repentance. No asking for another chance. These were the ones who were just very angry at the Lord. Some even started looking almost reptilian because of the hatred coming out of them. Some of them had been there for thousands of years. Time doesn't exist in eternity. The clock stops.

He saw people there who were there 2,000 years, 4,000 years. You just know the ancientness of it. He saw all different languages. Hell doesn't discriminate. The devil doesn't discriminate at all. The whole point is to get you there.

Mostly, the people in these cells were those who dabbled in witchcraft, Santeria, tarot cards, astrology. Those who wanted to know the future. Those who worshiped other gods or the doctrines of demons. Dominic had his own brush with Santeria growing up. They promise you everything materialistically. But what they don't tell you is once you worship these demons (which is what they are, though they make it seem like they're positive, here to help mankind), you owe them. And what you owe them is beyond this Earth. They have a spot waiting for you.

It reminds him of people who say, "Well, I didn't know the law." But if you go to court, you'd still go to jail. Ignorance is not a way out.

"The Lord told me that this place grows every day. Actually, it's growing by the second," Dominic says. Hell is alive. It's a dimension that is alive. You can even feel it. The ground of hell moves in waves, like breathing. The darkness has a component to it. It's alive.

The Gates of Hell

As he looked at the cells, all of a sudden he felt something again. This time he was standing on a cliff, looking down. It looked like a gray area with dead trees. An abandoned forest. A dead forest. But it had a path.

On the path, there were people chained together. As far as the eye could see. They looked like pure skeletons. None of them had flesh. They were all chained together. As he looked further ahead to where they were going, he saw gates and a wall so high he couldn't understand.

Then he felt something say, "Look again." He looked. Those were the gates of hell.

The place he thought was already hell wasn't even the beginning. He was in pre-hell. The gates of hell. People were marching in chains. The place he was at was before hell. But then there was something so much more extreme at the gates, once you hit the real dimension.

Now he was terrified beyond being terrified. There's nothing on this Earth that can even calibrate your mind to the fear that you already feel. Because even when he was there, he reminds people: here on Earth, you can be going through the toughest situations, in a hospital, in incarceration, but you always have people to communicate with. You always have fellowship.

In that dimension, you can be right next to a person and there is no communication. That fellowship comes from God. Just to be able to communicate with someone, to talk, to have that bond, that comes from God. So that is stripped away from you. There's no talking to anyone.

He thinks he was in pre-hell, but it strips you and gets you so afraid to go to the real experience. The chain of people was so long, and it kept getting longer, growing.

There were other people standing on the cliff with him, along the edge. The skeletons on the path were looking back, telling them, "Do not come". They were screaming. Some recognized their family members. Some recognized certain people. They were telling them, "Get out of here. Do not come here. Please don't come. Don't come." He heard things from different languages: Arabic, Spanish, all cultures.

But in his mind, he thinks the Lord put on his heart: "It's not our choice anymore. It's not up to us. That time is over".

The Snatch

Dominic made it up to the gates of hell. He was right there. And he knew he was going. The scariest part was he knew it. He was supposed to be there. That's what gets him emotional even now. He knew he deserved it. He had no excuse, no rebuttal. If he went to the judgment seat in front of God, he had nothing. He had to accept it. He knew he deserved it. That's the scariest part: you know you're supposed to be there.

But then, his mercy and grace. As Dominic was about to approach the gate, all of a sudden, the same way he came, he felt something instantaneous, so powerful, that pulled him. For a split second (though there's no time there), it felt so peaceful. He felt a love and a peace beyond comprehension. The same way that fear was beyond comprehension, but the opposite end of the spectrum. So caring.

"That's why I live my life the way I live it now, because I want that," Dominic says. "I want to go back just for that little instant that I felt of the Lord that snatched me out. Just even his presence, even just being around, even if he just touched you, the love on the tip of his finger is more love than the whole world has. That's how powerful it is."

He was snatched up. Instantly. He heard a ringing. It was loud. It shook his whole being. And he was slammed back into his body.

Back in the Body

He was in a hospital, on a hospital bed. It felt disgusting. Horrible. Like if you put on a lot of heavy clothes and got them wet. He felt like he knew he was wearing his body. He literally was wearing it. He knows the Lord showed him that to teach him: be in the world but don't be of it. We're in this body, but this body is a vehicle for you to learn things, to get closer to him. That's all it is. A vehicle.

But the enemy has made it so we put everything into satisfying the flesh, this vehicle, instead of satisfying the real you, the real spirit.

It took him weeks to shake the feeling off. He felt disgusting. He was like, "Where did they get the term 'flesh bag'?" He believes whoever coined that must have had a similar experience. That's what it is: a flesh bag. Until he got acclimated again back into his body.

He developed PTSD over the experience. Hell is so scary, so real, it almost drove him backward. But the Lord had grace on him to show him, to take him out of that.

The Message

Dominic is a pastor now. He and his wife run a ministry called the Narrow Path Society, based in Minneapolis, specializing in spiritual warfare. "Whatever you're doing, whatever you're doing, whatever you maximize, that's the sin, that's the opposite, that's what you're going to experience over and over and over," he says.

He thought that was it, that people were just getting prepped to go through the real gates of hell. He hasn't had the experience of going through those gates. But pre-hell, to him, is beyond anything he can describe. "So I can imagine when you're going to the permanent spot, real hell, the permanent hell," he says. It's unimaginable.

"Everything that you do, the Father's not up there taking account," Dominic explains. "He's not up there taking tabs on you, because first of all, God lives in you. He lives in all of us. So when you're doing these things, he's there with you. There's no escaping it. There's no hiding."

Who are you when no one's around? Who are you when no one's looking or listening? Are you deceptive? Are you kind when you're by yourself, just like you are in front of people? The Lord wants people to be authentic. Showing off in front of people, being very nice, but behind the scenes you're greedy, lustful, judging people in your mind. In public you volunteer, you're great at church, you donate, you're in the choir, you're a deacon. Everybody thinks you're great. But that doesn't really count. It counts if you're authentic. If you're doing it for the sincerity of pleasing the Lord, not yourself, not your self-gratification, not your credentials, not just to look good.

"There are people who've been negative and evil their whole life, but they had one sincere prayer," he says. "They were so authentically... they authentically craved him. Came clean. Literally, because they authentically wanted to be with him. They authentically apologized. They authentically wanted to repent."

The Lord is full of love, but he is very stern. A lot of churches these days have painted him to be very soft, demasculinized, all love, everything is forgiven. But people fail to realize: read the book of Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 26. "If you have the knowledge thereof and you repeat the same sins, there is no sacrifice that can save you from your sins," Dominic says. "There is no such thing as you can do what you want to do and pray about it and think you can just pray and then keep doing what you're doing. No, no, no."

He urges people to stop depending on their pastors and have their own personal relationship. Take time to read the scriptures yourself. Spend time with him alone. Build a personal relationship. "You don't want to be that guy or a woman to go in front of him and what does he say? 'I don't know you. Workers of iniquity, get, move around. I don't know you.'"

"When he returns, it's not going to be what you think it's going to be," Dominic says. "It's not going to be everybody's clapping and 'Kumbaya.' No. When he returns, it's about business. His father's business. He is not playing with no one."

What Dominic Learned

Dominic saw familiar spirits in hell, ascending and descending. Everyone when you're born is sent an agent, a spirit, a demon who monitors you. Who watches you. Who knows your every move, your diet, your likes, your dislikes, your comfort, your discomfort. Everything about you. It's like data mining.

If you have a psychic, a medium, they don't know anything about you. But their demon or familiar spirit is communicating with your familiar spirit. It makes it seem like the medium knows about you, but it's nothing but two demons communicating with each other. It's all a trap. Test every spirit.

Hell is highly organized. They have soldiers for everything. Every addiction, there's a ranking in the army for that. Lust, there's a ranking army for lust. Hatred, gossip. Everything is organized. A lot of these things we think are us, but we get attacked and influenced by these things because we don't have the protection of the Holy Spirit.

Dominic's message is urgent. "Every moment, eternity is on the other side of each moment," he says. He just lost another friend. They always had plans to change. But God is not a diet. People say, "I'm going to start eating right next week. I'm going to start my diet." A lot of people do that with God. "Well, I'm just going to do this this week, and then next week I'm going to start following the Lord and start getting it right." But you're not promised five seconds.

"Hell in the spiritual life is more real than this life," Dominic says. "The sensations are felt. All your sensations, everything, is magnified times a million. It is more realistic than this."

He wants people to take it beyond serious. "Put God in the center of your life, in the center of everything that you're doing," he says. "Because hell is waiting for you."

A Reflection on Dominic's Journey

Dominic's account is one of the most detailed descriptions of hell in the modern NDE literature. What makes it especially significant is not just the vividness of the experience, but the transformation it produced. This is a man who was hardened by the streets, who'd mastered the craft of gang life, who thought hell was a fairy tale. And then he went there.

The consistency of his testimony with other hellish NDEs is striking. The living darkness. The sulfur smell. The reptilian demons. The pits of torture. The knowledge, upon looking at a person, of why they're there. The regeneration of the body so torture can continue. The absence of fellowship, of communication, of hope. The stripping away of everything God gives us that we take for granted. These elements appear again and again in accounts from people who've never met, never read each other's stories, from different cultures and backgrounds.

But what's most important about Dominic's story is not the horror. It's the mercy. He was at the gates. He knew he deserved to be there. He had no argument. And then he felt that pull, that instantaneous, powerful, peaceful love that snatched him back. The love on the tip of God's finger, he says, is more love than the whole world has.

That's the message. Not that hell is waiting to swallow us, but that God's love is waiting to save us. That we have time, right now, to make the choice. To build an authentic relationship. To stop serving the flesh and start serving the spirit. To remember that this body is just a vehicle, and the real you is eternal.

Dominic now dedicates his life to waking people up. He's written books. He runs a ministry. He goes into the streets. Because he knows what's waiting. He knows that every moment, eternity is on the other side. And he knows that the Lord doesn't want anyone to go there. The Lord's heart aches for every person who ends up in hell.

The question Dominic asks is the question we all need to ask: Who are you when no one's around? Who are you when no one's looking? Are you authentic? Are you building treasures in heaven, or are you just satisfying the flesh? Are you spending your time with God, or with the world?

Take the time challenge, he says. Write "World" on one side of a paper, "God" on the other. Each day, ask yourself: who had more of my time today? At the end of the week, see who won. That'll put things in perspective.

Because hell is real. It's not a metaphor. It's not a scare tactic. It's a place, a dimension, here on Earth, and it's growing by the second. But heaven is real too. And the love that snatched Dominic back is available to all of us, right now, in this moment. We just have to choose it. Authentically. With our whole hearts.

That's the gift of Dominic's story. It's not just a warning. It's an invitation. To come back. To be snatched out of the darkness. To feel that peace, that love, that's beyond anything this world can offer. To live not for the flesh, but for the spirit. To remember that we're eternal beings, and this life is just the classroom. The real life, the one that lasts forever, is waiting. And we get to choose where we spend it.