ALLEN PARK -- What would you think about if you were about to die?

Lions tight end Hakeem Valles was sitting there, hogtied on the floor of some backwoods house in Haiti. He was blindfolded. All he could hear was screaming and screaming and oh my God so much screaming. But he couldn't understand any of it. They were speaking -- screaming -- in Creole. He heard gunshots. He peed his pants. He thought he was going to die.

"I thought that was it, man," Valles said. "My life flashed before my eyes. It was (bleeping) crazy, man. (Bleeping) crazy."

So what does a man think about when he's been taken hostage at gunpoint? What does a man think about when he's about to die?

"My brother," Valles said. "It's the most vivid memory I have. I remember thinking, 'I'm so glad he's not here, because this is it. Mom, Dad, me, Grandma, this is it for us. We're done.' And I remember just being grateful he wasn't there with us, because he had just gotten drafted like a month before. He had everything going for him. I was grateful."

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Lions tight end Hakeem Valles catches a pass during a preseason game against Tampa.

Hakeem Valles is in his second year with the Lions and currently on the practice squad. He's the son of Paul Valles, a veteran of the Army and New Jersey State Police, and Pam Valles, a preschool teacher who works with autistic children.

He's also the grandson of Paul Jean Marie Jizrel Benoni Marcel Valles, and Lucienne Valles, Haitian immigrants who came to this country in the early 1960s. He grew up on stories from Grandpa about what it was like back in the homeland. He always wanted to go. Once, he did, on a cruise with Royal Caribbean.

But when they arrived, he was disappointed. That part of Haiti was owned by the cruise line, and locals were discouraged from visiting. There were 12-foot walls to keep them out.

"It was fun," Valles said, "but it was fake Haiti."

So when he had the opportunity to return in 2015, he jumped at it.

There was a missionary program called "All Hands Together" that was affiliated with the First Haitian Baptist Church in Willingboro, N.J. It was looking for nurses, students, manual laborers, anyone who wanted to help the deeply impoverished island country.

The group also happened to be leaving two days after Valles graduated from Monmouth University, and returning just in time for the start of his graduate program. It was perfect.

"I couldn't have been more excited, man," Valles said. "It was like a vacation, but it was also cool getting in touch with your roots, you know? I'd just graduated. I was starting my fifth year. I was just so excited."

They left mid-May of 2015. Valles spent almost a week dispensing medical supplies in rural areas surrounding Port-au-Prince, the capital. They spent a day at a school, and another setting up a clinic in a mountaintop village. They spent another day at an orphanage.

"They had a whole area of people with special needs and stuff, and it was heartbreaking," Valles said. "You're like, 'Damn. These people have nothing. Nothing. And on top of that, they have severe disabilities.'"

Valles found the work difficult, and hot, and above all, rewarding. Their efforts and others' like it is essential. Haiti is so corrupt that convoys of medical supplies are often plundered.

"We've tried in the past to send down a car, and it would just get stolen at the border," Valles said. "It's a corrupt country. They'll just tell you, 'Oh, the car caught on fire,' or something like that."

After about a week, he took a personal day to hit a museum with his parents and grandmother in Port-au-Prince. That night, they returned to their compound on the rural outskirts of the city. It was storming like hell.

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Lions tight end Hakeem Valles, right, stands with his father, Paul, during a missionary trip to Haiti in 2015.

The house was small, with three or four bedrooms and a tight living space. About 15 people were staying there that week, including the missionaries, some nurses and a pastor. It was cramped, and it had been muggy all week, it being Haiti and all. So the rain felt good.

They opened the front door to let the fresh air roll in. Only the screen was shut, but the compound was protected by cinder-block walls that were 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire.

Valles and a couple others wanted to play cards and listen to the rain hit. Spades was their game.

Sometime after 2 a.m., Valles heard the first gun shot.

The bullet blew through the screen door. A piece of wood split his lip.

"Everything slowed down," Valles said. "You would have thought it was like 'The Matrix.' I froze. I'm like, 'What just happened?' Then I just saw a big boot kick through the screen door."

About a half-dozen men raided the compound with guns and knives. They were screaming in Haitian Creole, a language with roots in French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Taino, and various West African tongues. Valles doesn't speak it. He didn't know what was happening.

His friend jumped across the table they had been using to play cards and tackled him to the ground. The men flipped over the table and opened fire.

"Behind us on the wall, there were bullet holes," Valles said. "On the roof, there were bullet holes. There's screaming, there's crying, and I don't understand it. I'm crying. I'm screaming, 'MISSIONARY! MISSIONARY!' as we're trying to dodge bullets on the ground."

The shooting stops. The attackers take a shawl from one of the women, rip it into pieces and begin tying up prisoners like hogs. Then, the blindfolds.

Valles couldn't see anything. He couldn't understand what he was hearing. He remembers the screaming though, and the crying. So much screaming and crying as the men began robbing them of phones, computers, medical supplies, batteries, flashlights, everything. They punched the woman who runs the nonprofit in the face. They tried to rape another.

Hidden in a back room was Emmanuel Cezar, a well-known pastor in Haiti. He tried calling the police. The police said they wouldn't come. Welcome to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where violent crime is so common that the U.S. State Department warns about its threat in the first sentence of their travel advisory for Haiti.

"Local police may lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents," the State Department warns, "and emergency response, including ambulance service, is limited or non-existent."

Cezar tried calling a friend who lived nearby and told him to fire his gun into the air to spook the attackers. But Valles didn't know this. He was just sitting there, his hands tied to his feet, thinking about how lucky his brother Max was to have been drafted, to have not been here for this.

Then more gunfire was hailing from the streets.

"I'm just thinking, 'What the hell is happening?' Valles said. "I'm just thinking I'm going to die."

But the trick worked. The attackers thought they were under siege and left. Paul Valles freed himself, locked the front door, then began untying Hakeem. That's when the bandits figured out what happened, and returned.

They banged on the door. When nobody opened up, they began blowing out the windows with bullets. Paul Valles relented, and opened the door. The attackers re-tied him and threw him on top of his son.

"I'm thinking, 'They're about to kill him,'" Hakeem Valles said. "But they just roughed him up. Then they went back through the house to steal more stuff. I mean, they stole everything you can imagine."

At last, about 45 minutes after the attack began, the gunmen left for good. Valles was safe, but unraveling. He spent the night outside.

"I just sat out there with knives in my hands, thinking about what might happen before the sun came up," Valles said. "It's crazy, bro."

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Lions tight end Hakeem Valles, rear center, with a missionary group in Haiti in May 2015.

The sun did come up. They were safe. But nothing could make Valles feel like he was safe. He had to leave the country, and he had to leave it right now.

He headed back to Port-au-Prince to catch the first available flight out. The sound of a kid eating Doritos behind him on the plane gave him a panic attack. He stuffed his head between his legs. He sobbed.

"I had to start grad school, like, three days later," Valles said. "That was probably, honestly, one of the toughest times of my life."

He was plagued by night terrors. He would dream about active-shooter situations in malls. He would die. And then he would wake up.

Once, he was hanging with friends outside his dorm when a teammate snuck up on them.

"There was maybe three of us sitting on a bench, and this linebacker just creeps up on us and then yells, 'FREEZE! 911!' Valles said. "I just instantly started crying. I didn't even know what's wrong with me, you know? I just couldn't help it. It was bad.

"We had a therapist on campus, and he really helped me out with the PTSD."

A few weeks later, he got some closure. Word came from his grandmother that at least some of the same men tried to take down another group of missionaries. Two were caught by local villagers.

"They burned 'em alive," Valles said, "and shot them dead in front of everybody."

Also helping: Football.

"The grind from that, honestly, was my escape," Valles said. "It was my chip (on my shoulder), and my secret that got me through everything. I remember that summer that I knew, 'OK, I think I can go to the NFL. So what are you going to do about it?'"

That's exactly what he did.

He returned to Monmouth and caught a career-high 22 passes for 236 yards. His combination of speed and length intrigued scouts, and Arizona signed him as an undrafted free agent.

He's spent most of the past two-plus years bouncing between practice squads and active rosters. He likes the fit in Detroit, and stayed put even when Arizona came calling with a roster job last year. He enjoyed a strong offseason with the Lions over the summer, and broke camp with the team in September. He caught two passes in three games before returning to the practice squad.

Now he continues his fight to make it in the NFL.

"Whenever I had that feeling like I wanted to quit or whatever, all I had to do was just think, 'You're not lying on the ground. You're not tied up. You don't have a gun pointed at your face. You're just playing football,'" Valles said.

"I could program my mind to be like, 'Just go out there and try to kill yourself. I bet you can't.'"