DENVER -- An American woman says it's a miracle she survived an attack by pirates who fired bullets at her on a lake on the U.S.-Mexico border after they shot her husband.

Berthoud, Colo., native Tiffany Hartley, 29, told The Denver Post she and her husband, David, were sightseeing Thursday on private personal watercraft on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake when pirates in three speedboats started chasing them.

"We saw that they had guns, so we started racing away from them," she said from her home in McAllen, Texas.

The pirates shot her husband in the back of the head, and he fell in the water, she said. She spun her craft around to her husband, dove into the water and tried to drag her 250-pound husband to the side of her craft.

"I tried pulling him up, but I couldn't," Hartley said.

She says she retreated as bullets whizzed by her. "It's a miracle I'm even here," she said, crying on the phone.

Texas authorities have said David Hartley, 30, is believed to have died.

The Denver Post reports the couple met in high school in Loveland, Colo., and had been married about eight years. They moved to Reynosa, N.M., about three years ago and then to Texas five months ago, where David Hartley worked in the oil industry.

They were about a week away from moving back to Colorado after work slowed down in Texas, Tiffany Hartley said.

There have been a spate of robberies on the lake, and Texas authorities have warned visitors to stay on the U.S. side of the lake.