Travis Barker Plane Crash Hell & Truth Behind DJ AM's Overdose

It's been more than seven years since Travis Barker, his best friend Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein, assistant Chris Baker and security guard Charles "Che" Still were involved in a deadly plane crash while taking off from South Carolina following a performance. The Blink 182 rocker, 39, finally tells his story about the tragic night in his new memoir, Can I Say.

Barker's on-again, off-again wife, model Shanna Moakler, almost went on the trip to Columbia, South Carolina for his gig with best friend, AM. But at the last minute, she decided to stay home with their children. "Just in case something happens, I don't want us both to be going," she prophetically told Barker, according to the rocker.

He says his daughter also made a cryptic statement before he left Los Angeles. "The roof's gonna come off, Dad, the roof's gonna come off!" Alabama, then almost 3, allegedly screamed.

After the show, the group decided to leave that very night, instead of the next morning as originally planned.

Barker says he called his father and said he had a "weird f***ing feeling" about the flight.

Just before the tiny Learjet 60 went airborne, he says it made a "POW" noise and the cabin filled with smoke, which turned into a fire. The plane wildly jerked into the air, and Barker started praying out loud. "I knew the worst was coming: I was going to die," he recalls.

The plane eventually crash-landed across a highway in an embankment. Barker says his body was on fire, but he started running. "I was in the craziest pain ever, like nothing I had ever felt before," he writes. "I didn't think I was going to survive."

DJ AM, who had also escaped the plane, helped Barker put out the fire by using his shirt to smother the flames. "If he hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't have feet or legs today," Barker claims.

Barker was left with third degree burns on 65% of his body, and was eventually moved to a burn center in Georgia. At that time he was told that Baker, Still and both pilots had died.

In a rage, Barker blamed his manager, Lawrence "LV" Vavra, for the crash, since he had scheduled the flight. It took him two months to get over his anger.

Barker had 26 surgeries after the crash, on his burns and back, which had been broken in three places. For a long time, he was in horrific amounts of pain, since his past prescription pill abuse gave him a high tolerance for medications.

Drama in the hospital! One night Moakler visited Barker in the hospital, and snuck through his emails while he was sleeping. "F*** you b***, how dare you mess with my man, this is Shanna, f*** you," he realized she had written to his ex-girlfriends. He later found out she was hanging around an ex-boyfriend at the time.

Barker left the hospital 11 weeks after the accident, but was still in rough shape, physically and mentally. "Every day, my post-traumatic psychiatrist, Jonathan Simon, visited me for a session at my house," he writes. "I felt I had seen the face of death. I had dreams about dying and the plane crash."

Barker eventually ended his relationship with Moakler because he says she yelled "I'm happy your friends died."

DJ AM had escaped major physical injuries in the crash, but the mental impact was just as serious. He joined support groups and after 12 years of sobriety, began taking Xanax to ease anxiety when flying. "I thought it was a mistake— I knew how easy it was for that to be a gateway to more dangerous things," Barker writes.

The next summer, Barker and AM played a show in Vegas. "Trav, I'm fucked up, man," AM told his pal, according to Barker. "I feel like doing mad drugs and just saying f*** it." Those were the last words he ever heard him speak.

On August 29, 2009, Barker was recording new material in the studio when he read the news on a computer nearby: AM had died of an overdose at just 36. "I was in shock: I felt like there was a rock in my throat that I couldn't swallow," Barker writes. "I felt like a piece of me had just died. I burst into tears and left the studio."