The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (15 page)

L
aDonna Cobb and her husband, Steve, had raced to Briarwood Elementary to pick up their three daughters—Cydney, eleven, Jordan, nine, and Erin, seven—and take them out of the storm’s way. But as the tornado began to wind its way toward Moore, Cobb, an assistant teacher at the school who worked with the prekindergarten classes, suddenly couldn’t leave. She couldn’t bear to walk away from the four-year-olds she had taught every day for the last eight months, who now sat crouched and trembling along a hallway near their classroom as the storm approached. If only the bad weather were coming through an hour later, the kids would be with their parents and presumably safer. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had to confront the situation as it was.

Blond and tan, Cobb was thirty-eight, but she looked at least ten years younger. No one could believe she had three kids, much less an eleven-year-old, and at school some of the little boys had crushes on her, which they confessed only to their mothers. They thought Mrs. Cobb was so pretty. She wasn’t even supposed to be at Briarwood that day: She had taken the afternoon off to join her husband to sign the closing papers on their new home about a mile and a half away. It was an exciting day for them. For the better part of the spring, the family had been crammed into a tiny apartment after their original home, a few blocks down the street from Briarwood, had sold earlier than they’d expected. With most of their belongings in storage, they had borrowed Steve’s sister’s truck and planned to begin moving stuff into their new home that afternoon, just in time for summer.

Cobb knew storms were in the forecast, but it wasn’t until her iPhone began blaring an emergency warning about a tornado approaching Moore that she realized how bad it really was. She and Steve quickly headed to Briarwood, just off 149th Street, a few blocks shy of the Moore city limits, where they found the school in total chaos. Unlike Plaza Towers, which had a classic school building layout, Briarwood was made up of four separate “pods,” or buildings of four classrooms apiece, linked by open-air sidewalks. Frantic parents were scrambling everywhere looking for their kids, who were being sheltered in different spots all over the grounds—from bathrooms to interior hallways to closets. As Steve marched off to find their daughters, Cobb stopped by her classroom in the main building. She was pained by the looks of fear on her students’ faces as her colleague Stacey Montgomery and her friend Katie Dodd, who had filled in for her that day, took turns rubbing the kids’ backs and singing nursery songs to keep them calm. For the most part they were succeeding, but Cobb could tell the kids were frightened. They shouldn’t have to be going through something like this, she thought, not at their age.

It wasn’t long before Steve reappeared at her side. He was generally easygoing, which was why she had fallen in love with him so long ago. But he looked nervous, which alarmed her. “We need to go,” he said, the urgency clear in his voice. But Cobb shook her head. “I can’t leave,” she told him. She dropped to the ground and began to try to comfort her students alongside her colleagues. She simply could not stand the idea of the children going through the storm without their parents. Cobb knew she would want someone to do the same thing for her kids if they were separated. And so she rubbed their tiny backs and tried to reassure them. “It’s going to be okay,” Cobb said again and again. In her heart she couldn’t believe that the storm was really going to hit. It had to miss them. It just had to. Outside, the storm sirens continued their ominous wail.

 • • • 

A little over a mile to the northeast, Amy Simpson was trying to keep everyone calm as kids and teachers took shelter in the hallways of Plaza Towers Elementary. It wasn’t easy. Just as they were at Briarwood, parents were running through the hallways in a panic looking for their kids in hopes of escaping the approaching storm. Outside the wind had whipped up, and sheets of heavy rain and hail began to pound the building. It sounded like a war zone outside, but Simpson was determined to keep the environment inside as calm as possible. It was the only thing she felt she could actually control in a situation that was rapidly turning into a nightmare.

Suddenly a frantic father rushed through the school’s front door, flew past Simpson, and slipped on the floor, which was wet from people coming in out of the rain. She reached out and grabbed him by the back of his shirt, saving him from crashing to the ground. “Calm down!” she ordered as she helped steady him. “You can’t go down my hall like that. You have to remain calm.” The man was livid. “A fucking tornado is coming!” he screamed, cursing her as kids nearby watched and began to cry. “
Calm down,
” Simpson repeated, a little more emphatic but mostly unmoved by his emotional outburst. “I’m not going to let you scare my kids.”

She began to walk the halls of Plaza’s front building, checking on her staff and students as they sat crouched on their knees on the cold concrete floors, with their heads against the interior brick walls. It was their usual tornado position. As she patrolled, Simpson could hear the storm picking up intensity outside, and it scared her. But she forced herself to remain focused and strong. The kids were young, but they were smart, and they were incredibly intuitive. She knew if they sensed her fear they would be even more terrified than they already were. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to be strong, strong enough for everyone—even her teachers, who were being so very brave but were, she knew, panicked inside. She thought of Karen Marinelli, one of her first-grade teachers, who had witnessed the power of tornadoes firsthand. In her first year as a teacher Marinelli’s classroom at Kelley Elementary had been obliterated by the 1999 tornado. And now here she was in another storm’s path. Simpson could only imagine what she must be feeling.

She didn’t have time to stop and think about the monster that was putting all of them at risk. She tried not to think of what it could take from her, how she might not see her husband, the love of her life, or her beloved kids ever again. She didn’t have time to think of herself. She didn’t have time to think, period. She could only act, and her goal at the moment was to keep as many people as possible at Plaza calm and safe—or as safe as they could be in a nearly fifty-year-old school building built in era when tornadoes were generally much gentler and less frequent than they were now. While some of the classes at Briarwood, which had opened in 1985, were taking shelter in classrooms where the only window was in the door leading to the hallway, almost every room at Plaza had several windows, which made them too dangerous. But the hallways weren’t ideal either. Many were lined with glass skylights—an aesthetically appealing design that allowed natural light to flow in. As hail began to pound the glass above, Simpson worried they might come crashing down at any moment, making an already bad situation even worse.

Still, her teachers were doing what they could to keep their students calm, and she loved them for it. As she walked the halls, she could hear tiny voices chanting their ABCs. In the hallway closest at the front of the building, Erin Baxter was leading her prekindergarten class in a rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Other teachers were trying to get their students’ minds off the storm raging outside by asking them to talk about how they planned to spend their summer vacation, which was just days away. All they had to do was make it through this terrible moment.

As she approached one corridor, Simpson heard the voice of Gary England, as a teacher had pulled up KWTV’s streaming coverage of the storm on her iPhone. “If you are not below ground, you will not survive this,” she heard someone tell England. Her heart sank, and she rushed down the hall and ordered the teacher to turn it off. “The kids don’t need to hear that,” she snapped, in a tone she rarely used with anyone, even her own kids when they were acting up. She felt bad, but she didn’t want her students feeling more helpless and scared than they already did in the face of a monster storm from which the hallways of this old school were their only shelter.

 • • • 

At Briarwood, Steve Cobb tried again to convince his wife that they needed to leave, but again she refused to budge. Up and down the hallways scared teachers were beginning to improvise ways to protect their students. They handed kids the heaviest books they could find that weren’t already packed up for the end of school year. “Cover your heads,” the teachers ordered. They piled backpacks and mats and extra blankets on top of the kids to cushion them in case of debris. One teacher raided her closet and found the sweaters she used on cold days and bundled up her kids, who began to sweat in the increasingly humid hallways. Like the lights, the school’s air-conditioning system was going on and off as the power flickered from the already-intense winds outside. Leesa Kniffen and Suzanne Haley, first-grade teachers, began pushing desks against the interior wall of Kniffen’s classroom and ordered students to brace themselves underneath, in the hope that the desks would act as buffers between the students and any debris should the building come down. All the while parents continued to rush into the school yelling for their kids.

 • • • 

In the sky about a mile to the south, KWTV’s Jim Gardner continued to hover in his helicopter, watching the storm move east. The tornado was so wrapped up in rain and debris, he could barely make out the funnel. It just looked like a massive black wall on the ground heading toward Moore. As he panned to the east, Gardner caught a glimpse of something that made his stomach drop: a long line of car headlights snaking down Santa Fe Avenue that appeared to be several miles long. The traffic jam was worse than any he’d ever seen in Oklahoma, and instantly he suspected they were cars driven by parents rushing to get to their kids. But these people were in serious danger. They were sitting right in the path of the storm, a mile or less from the front edge of the tornado. He frantically called out to England and the crew in the studio to get on air, knowing there was a chance that many of those people might be listening to KWTV, which was being simulcast on the radio. “It’s a logjam, Gary!” Gardner cried. “Those people need to get out of there!” As Gardner panned over to show how close the tornado was, England began acting almost like a traffic reporter, calling out the coordinates of where the storm was and redirecting drivers down different streets. “Get the heck out of there! Go north!” England ordered. For some it was too late to get out of the path of the storm, and he advised them to start looking for a large, sturdy building where they could take cover. “Do not get caught in your car like this!” England said.

 • • • 

For some in Moore, school buildings seemed to be the safest spots, and as Baxter sat with her kids at Plaza Towers, she saw people from the neighborhood begin to run in and take shelter alongside them, believing it might be safer than their own homes, which were about as old the school. She saw husbands and wives, people young and old. One man even came in with his dog, which looked friendly but spooked.

Down the hall, on the east side of the school, Janice Brim, a sixth-grade teacher, got a text from her husband, Mark, who was watching the storm from near their home at 119th Street and May Avenue in south Oklahoma City—about 3 miles northwest of Plaza Towers. He had grabbed their dog and driven west when it looked like the tornado might come his way, but now, heading back east, he watched as the storm passed about 2 miles directly south of him. Even from this distance he could see the twister’s fury, how it was ripping apart everything in its path. And it appeared to be headed straight for his wife and her school. He was a builder, and he knew Plaza Towers. Sheltering in the hallway wasn’t going to be enough. “You have to take deeper shelter,” he said, calling her to emphasize the urgency.

By then Brim had five students left. The rest of her class had been checked out early by their parents. She considered her options. Near her classroom was a printer closet—a tiny space no bigger than five feet by five feet. But the closet, which was right next to the bathrooms, looked sturdy, so she piled her students in. They barely fit, and once inside they covered themselves with backpacks. Other teachers nearby followed her lead, shoving their students into the bathrooms.

As the wind howled outside, Brim and her students began to sing to ease the tension—mostly old church praise songs like Psalm 91. “I will not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies in the day,” they sang. “He will cover me with his feathers, and under his wings I will hide.” Brim knew how scared her kids were. They were physically shaking, and their voices trembled in a way that just killed her. Why was this happening to kids who had barely had a chance to live their lives? Brim tried not to cry. Unlike the other students at Plaza, her kids were old enough to understand what was happening, old enough to feel the fear that comes with knowing.

As they paused to think of another song to sing, one of the boys turned to Brim. And even in the darkened closet, with just a sliver of light coming through the door, she could see his eyes wide with terror. “Mrs. Brim, promise me we aren’t going to die?” he said. Brim did everything she could not to burst into tears as she paused to consider her answer. She couldn’t lie to them, not now. “I can’t promise you that,” she finally said, her voice thick. “But I can tell you that God is a lot stronger than this tornado.”

W
ith the tornado bearing down on Moore from the west, Alyson Costilla was driving as fast as she could to get out of its way. As she headed south, she could see the ominous clouds to her right in the distance. She wanted to stop and stare, but she kept driving. It was what her mother, Terri Long, had ordered her to do. “Drive as far to the south as you can,” she’d said. And there had been something in her mother’s voice that made it clear she’d better listen.

Less than an hour earlier Alyson had been on her way to her last class of the day at Southmoore High School, just off Nineteenth Street in Moore. She was five days away from graduating, and though she still had to get through her final classes and exams, she was already caught up in that euphoric state of mind that slowly overtakes high-school seniors so tantalizingly close to the finish line. There had been days of signing yearbooks and taking photos and tearful hugs among friends who swore to remain close forever even as they knew deep down they would probably drift apart.

Alyson was already thinking of her life beyond high school. She had been accepted at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, an hour north of Moore, where she planned to study sports medicine. Her mother was already a rabid OSU fan, but together they bought new burnt-orange T-shirts emblazoned with Pistol Pete, the school’s cowboy mascot, and proudly wore them to celebrate her admission. Though she wouldn’t actually move to campus until August, she and her mother had already been plotting all the things they’d buy for her dorm room. Sometimes her mom seemed more excited than she was.

Alyson had always heard girls talk about their close relationships with their mothers, but Terri, who would celebrate her fiftieth birthday in exactly a week, really was her best friend. There was no one in the world she was closer to. They spent hours together talking and shopping and hanging out at school events, where Terri often volunteered. When Alyson’s cheerleading squad competed at the national championships in Dallas, Terri was there with the other cheer moms. Her mother had even camped out with her to see the
Twilight
movie a few years earlier. The day before, she and her mom had spent hours at Penn Square Mall looking for the perfect dress for her to wear to her graduation that coming Saturday. It took all day to find a dress, but Terri didn’t seem to mind. It was precious time spent with her daughter, who would soon be gone, on her own.

Terri Long was occasionally misty-eyed at the thought of sending her youngest baby out into the world. Her two older kids, Terry Don and Jenna, were well out of the nest now and had children of their own—adorable toddlers who referred to their grandmother as “Mimi.” But she could barely control her excitement about Alyson’s graduation. She’d sent out invitations to the family weeks before, and when her daughter had come home with her royal blue cap and gown, she’d immediately made her try them on. As her daughter had modeled for her, she had been beside herself with joy. “I’m so proud of you,” she’d said, her eyes wet with tears.

To her family and friends Terri Long was a rock, a calming force who had raised her kids to be strong, even when it was hard to be. She had an adventurous spirit. She loved Harley-Davidsons—so much that her username for everything was “Crazy4Harleys2.” And she often quoted Janis Joplin, telling her kids, “Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.” But that day she was visibly nervous, which wasn’t like her.

A registrar at the Federal Aviation Administration, she was at her office near the Oklahoma City airport when she first saw reports of bad weather developing to the south. It was the usual routine in Moore, where she’d lived for half of her life, but this storm looked more treacherous than the bad front that had moved through the previous day. Concerned, she called the administration office at Southmoore and asked that her daughter be released early. Then she phoned Alyson and told her to go their home on SW Fourteenth, a few blocks west of Plaza Towers Elementary. She was leaving work early and would meet her there, she said. She promised to be home soon.

With the clouds growing more ominous by the second, her coworkers had urged her to wait out the storm at work, arguing that it was too dangerous to drive into Moore. But even as the emergency sirens began to wail, she wouldn’t stay put. She needed to get to her daughter, and out the door she ran. Just after she began her 14-mile commute home, the tornado dropped from the clouds and began its march toward Moore. Listening to the weather reports in the car, Long knew she probably wouldn’t beat the storm, and she called Alyson and told her to get out of the house and head south.

Now, driving in the heavy rain toward Norman, it was Alyson’s turn to worry. According to the radio, the tornado was cutting down 149th Street, the route her mother sometimes took to get home from work. She tried calling her mom again and again but couldn’t get through. She began to panic. Finally, after another attempt, her mother answered, but Alyson could barely understand what she was saying. It sounded like she was saying she was driving down Interstate 44 toward home. But that made no sense to Alyson because that would place her mother directly in the path of the storm, and she wouldn’t take a risk like that. But before she could ask her to explain, the call abruptly cut out.

 • • • 

At KOCO Damon Lane briefly stepped off camera and again he texted his wife, Melissa. It had been nearly half an hour since she’d told him she was leaving work, and she still hadn’t responded to his last message. On radar the tornado was on 149th Street in Oklahoma City. But as it tracked toward Moore, it appeared to be moving a little bit to the northeast, putting it on a path that would take it right to his house, a few blocks south of Fourth Street on the east side of town. His heart began to beat even faster. Could this really be happening?

When Lane had moved to Moore four years ago, right after taking the job at Channel 5, he had known better than anyone the city’s history with treacherous weather. He had even studied previous Moore storms, including the 1999 tornado, in meteorology classes at the University of North Carolina. But even now, watching live images of a monster twister taking dead aim at his home, there was a part of him that could not really believe on a personal level what was actually happening. He had always known intellectually that weather was ruthless and anybody was at risk. But now, with his wife, his dogs, and his home seemingly in the path of a killer tornado, Lane suddenly understood in a sick-to-your-stomach, heart-wrenching way how savage and arbitrary this beast really was.

He had never really considered what it might be like to be on air following a storm that was putting his own family at deadly risk. It wasn’t something they taught you at school. But now here he was, and it was happening. It felt at times like an out-of-body experience. But the adrenaline kept him going, and even as he began to list streets and businesses increasingly close to his home, Lane knew he had a responsibility to the tens of thousands of other people who lived in Moore or had family there and were going through the same nightmare he was. He messaged his wife again. “Are u in the shelter?” he wrote. Located in the garage, the underground cubby was brand new, a surprise wedding gift Lane hoped his family would never have to use.

 • • • 

In the sky south of Moore, KFOR helicopter pilot Jon Welsh was monitoring a tornado that was now wrapped in so much rain and debris it looked like a dark fog of death slowly drifting toward Moore, illuminated only by massive power flashes as it blocked out the afternoon sun. And as he flew, listening to both air traffic control and producers back at the studio, Welsh was frantically texting his wife. Like Lane, he lived in Moore—almost in the same spot, except he was on the north side of Fourth Street and Lane on the south, near Bryant Avenue. When the tornado had hit the ground, Welsh had grabbed his cell phone, which still worked at this altitude, and called his wife, Alison, who was out running errands with their youngest daughter, Maddie. “Is it really that bad?” she’d asked him when he told her the storm was headed toward Moore. She told her husband she was going to go pick up their oldest daughter, Morgan, from school and then head home. But he sensed she didn’t understand how serious the storm was. “You have to get to the shelter
now,
” he’d emphatically told her, as he watched the vortex rapidly expand in size. “I
am not
kidding.”

Welsh didn’t hear from his wife after that. He assumed but didn’t know for sure that she’d made it home. Now, as the storm prepared to cross into Moore from Oklahoma City, she wasn’t responding to text messages, which wasn’t like her. It made him nervous. While Lane could see on the radar that his house was in danger, Welsh could physically see from the helicopter that his house was in the bull’s-eye of the storm, and it scared him to death.

As he stood ready to go back on air with Mike Morgan, Welsh took several deep breaths and tried to remain calm, tapping into the military training that had helped him keep his head when he was flying combat missions over war-torn Baghdad. That had been scary, but it was nothing like this. His heart ached as he thought of his young family in the path of a tornado that was heartlessly ripping apart everything in its wake. Describing for KFOR’s audience what he was seeing, Welsh realized his wife might be listening. “It’s going towards the Moore, Warren Theatre area,” Welsh said in a voice that did not betray the panic he was feeling. And then, just as calmly, he stated his worst nightmare in a tone that could be described as nothing less than matter-of-fact. “It’s going right basically towards my house,” he said.

 • • • 

At Plaza Towers Amy Simpson was still walking the halls, checking on her students and teachers. The wind was howling outside, and she could hear the old building creak around her in response to the pressure of the storm. At that point the power started to go on and off, scaring the kids, who were beginning to cry. The teachers did their best to console them, but even as they put on brave faces and tried to distract their students with songs and stories and anything else that would keep their minds off the storm raging outside, Simpson knew her staff was scared too. They all were. She suddenly thought of all the time she’d spent crouched in the hallway in her tornado position as a kid growing up in Moore. It was a memory she had always associated with fun, getting out of class to hang out in the hallway, where the lights had been shut off to mimic the real scenario of the storm. She’d always had snacks and her favorite stuffed animal. One year she’d even had a tiny flashlight. Even recently, as she’d practiced the drill as a teacher and now as principal, it had never entered her mind to feel any fear: They’d never been in any real danger. How she wished this were just another drill.

Suddenly she felt her iPhone vibrate. It was a text message from her husband, Lindy, who had picked up their kids from school and was at their house a couple of miles to the southeast of Plaza. Scarlet and Roarke were already in a neighbor’s underground storm shelter, but Lindy was nervously pacing the driveway outside, listening to the weather broadcasts and braving the heavy rain and hail to look at the storm toward the west. He feared the worst, and he did not mince words with his wife. “It’s going to hit you,” he wrote. Panic shot through Simpson’s heart, but she willed herself to remain calm, knowing that it was her responsibility to the students and her staff to keep it together even in the face of a nightmare storm that threatened to kill them all.

Rushing back to her office, she passed a side door and saw the back building several yards away where Plaza’s second- and third-grade classes were held. She paused. Simpson knew many of the kids had been checked out early because she’d seen them dash through the hallway with their mom or dad. But she didn’t know how many kids were left, and she began to worry. She wanted to go to them, to check on them, to make sure they were safe and so that she would know who was there. But as she walked to the door, she could see the sky raining down huge chunks of hail, and she thought of her husband’s message warning her that the storm was coming for them. At this point she didn’t know how far the tornado was from the school. She couldn’t see it. And she worried she wouldn’t have time to make it back to the intercom in her office, where she wanted to be to pass along the final warning when the storm was about to hit. So she turned and kept walking, her pace a little quicker than before, praying that the back building would be safe.

When she reached the front of the school, Simpson saw kids lined up with their parents, who were still rushing last minute to get out of the storm’s way. As hail and heavy rain continued to pelt the ground outside, one little girl began to cry and told her she didn’t want to go because she was too scared. Simpson was scared too, but she didn’t dare show it. In her head she reminded herself to be strong. “No, ma’am,” she told the little girl, as she fluffed up her backpack around her. “You have to go with your mom and dad.” But as she nudged her to the door, Simpson had a second thought and stopped. She grabbed a heavy hardcover textbook off a shelf nearby and told the little girl to use it to cover her head. Simpson began to do the same with other kids as they left the school, doing anything she could to protect their fragile little bodies from the unmerciful storm outside. Soon the shelf was bare.

For a moment Simpson found herself thinking of her own kids, wishing she’d hugged them a little tighter that morning before school. She would see them again. She didn’t dare let herself think otherwise.
We’re going to make it through this,
she told herself. She walked back into the hallway, wondering if she had time to make one more lap to check on the students. Outside there seemed to be a lull in the storm, and she could hear the gentle little voices of her kindergartners singing nursery rhymes. They sounded like tiny angels straight from heaven.

A mother and father rushed past Simpson with their kid. She paused, watching them as they raced out the front entrance and ran toward the parking lot. Silently she prayed they would be safe. But suddenly she saw them glance west and stop dead in their tracks. Their faces wrenched in fear, they grabbed their child and quickly ran back toward the school. Simpson’s stomach dropped as she felt panic seize her body. At that very moment she knew the nightmare was real: The tornado was on their doorstep. She didn’t even wait to hear what the parents would say before turning and rushing back into her office. Around her the lights began to flicker again, and she prayed the power would stay on long enough for her to get on the intercom one last time. She lifted the receiver, and in a voice that was so calm she couldn’t believe it was coming from her body, she said the words that she had dreaded since the moment she had heard the storm sirens wail almost a half hour before.