Trevor Reed, the former Marine who was freed last month after spending nearly three years imprisoned in Russia, described to CNN the harrowing conditions he faced, adding he feared for his life while at a psychiatric treatment facility. 

In an interview with the network, the Texas native said he was placed in a cell with seven other prisoners who all had severe psychological issues. Most of them, he said, were jailed for murder, some for multiple killings.

“That was not a good place,” Reed, 30, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There’s blood all over the walls there. Prisoners had killed themselves or killed other prisoners or attempted to do that. The toilet’s just a hole in the floor, and there’s crap everywhere, all over the floor, on the walls. There’s people in there also that walk around, they look like zombies.”

Reed said he didn’t sleep for the first couple of days he was in the facility because he was too worried. 

“You thought they might kill you?” CNN’s Tapper asked him.

“Yeah, I thought that was a possibility,” Reed replied.

The full interview with Reed and his family will be broadcast Sunday night, but CNN’s “New Day” aired excerpts Friday morning.

Reed was involved in a prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia on April 27. The former Marine was arrested in the summer of 2019 after Russian authorities accused him of assaulting an officer while being driven to a police station following a night of heavy drinking. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Reed and his family deny the allegations, and the U.S. government described him as being unjustly detained.

In exchange for Reed, the U.S. released a Russian pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, who had been serving a 20-year federal sentence for smuggling cocaine into the country.

In the CNN interview, Reed said he tried to distract himself in prison by thinking about future plans, such as what college he might attend or things he might do with his family.

But he also said he refused to hope he would someday be freed. 

“Other people are not going to like what I’m going to say about this, but I kind of viewed their having hope as being a weakness,” he said. “I did not want to have that hope of me being released somehow and then have that taken from me.”