The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (19 page)

A street away, on Penn Lane, Jerrie Bhonde was sitting inside the shower with her husband, Hemant, as the tornado approached. They didn’t have a storm shelter, but even if they had, her husband was so frail he probably wouldn’t have been able to make it down the steps. A former worker at the local General Motors plant, Hemant suffered from osteoporosis so severe that he could barely leave the house. Jerrie, his wife of forty years, had retired to care for her husband, who had immigrated to Oklahoma from India decades ago. They spent their entire days together laughing and talking. He often sat at the window looking out at Plaza Towers Elementary across the field from their house. He loved to watch the kids play and frolic—even if he could barely move.

In the bathroom the ground began to shake as the tornado approached, and Jerrie clutched her husband’s hand tightly, telling him how much she loved him. Suddenly it was upon them, and the walls around them disintegrated in seconds. The couple began to be sucked into the air by the monster twister, but Jerrie refused to let go. The storm would not take her beloved. Yet the force soon became too much and she felt her grip begin to slip. She barely had time to look at his face one last time before her husband disappeared into the sky.

O
utside the nearly forty-year-old walls of Plaza Towers Elementary it had grown eerily still. The rain had ceased, the hail had stopped, and even the blustery winds that had been screaming through the school’s creaky old windows seemed to have momentarily died down. To anyone who didn’t know better, it might have seemed that the storm had miraculously lifted, that the horrible nightmare suddenly was over. Yet it’s the silence that people who live in Tornado Alley have learned to fear the most, that ominous pause before the worst usually comes.

The teachers inside Plaza Towers knew it likely wasn’t over, but as they crouched down in the dark hallways alongside or on top of their tiny students, some couldn’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe, their desperate pleas to God had been answered. That somehow that terrible tornado coming for them had lifted right back up into the sky, sparing their students, their school, and their city.
Lord, lift it, please lift it,
Emily Eischen, a thirty-three-year-old second-grade teacher, silently prayed as she knelt in the hallway of the school’s back building.

But in the distance she could hear a dull roar, and as the storm crept closer and closer, the sound grew louder and even more grotesque. The noise was unlike anything she had ever heard before, so horrifying it seemed to come straight from the lowest depths of hell. It was a ghastly combination of the whooshing, high-pitched sound of a whining jet engine and the rattling, metallic rumble of a howling freight train speeding out of control. As it grew near, one could hear snapping wood and the ear-piercing screech of bending steel. It was the gnashing, violent soundtrack of an increasingly demonic monster that pulverized everything in its path, sparing almost nothing on the landscape as it made its way toward Plaza Towers and the heart of Moore.

Inside the school the tornado’s roar grew impossibly loud, so deafening that it felt to many as if their ears were about to explode. The building began to shake and the ground rumbled beneath them, and as the storm seemed to be right on top of them, the teachers braced themselves for the hit, anticipating it like the car wreck you see coming too late to prevent. Time seemed to stand still. Instead of hitting the building, the twister only howled painfully louder. The storm had slowed to a crawl—torturously prolonging the terror of the teachers, who clutched their students closer, unsure of what to do.

Near the front of the building Amy Simpson was crammed into a tiny one-person bathroom inside her office, listening to the tornado as it grew near. She was squeezed in with four other women—Penny, her office assistant; a secretary; the school’s guidance counselor; and the music teacher. The space was barely four feet wide and there was not an inch of room to spare. Simpson was on the ground, her body wrapped around the slim pedestal of the sink. Her secretary was sitting on the toilet behind her, her knees digging sharply into Simpson’s back as she grabbed the top of the sink for reinforcement. The others were jammed in tight on the floor around them. They had covered their heads with cushions taken from their office chairs—though Simpson wondered how much help they would really be.

The electricity had gone out and the bathroom was pitch-black, illuminated only by a thin sliver of light that peeked around the sides of the closed door. But that soon faded as the sky outside grew even darker than it had been before, the daylight now blocked out completely by the ominous wall of a storm that was just blocks away. Simpson had never been so close to a tornado before. Somehow she’d missed all the other storms that had hit Moore over the years. Simpson loved the weather, but she had never once forgotten how dangerous it could be.

Her mother had survived a direct hit from the 1955 tornado that had leveled much of tiny Blackwell, Oklahoma, near the Kansas border. Later categorized as an F5 tornado, the storm had killed twenty people, injured two hundred, and destroyed nearly four hundred buildings, wiping them clear to the ground. Simpson’s mother had been only five at the time, but she was still haunted by the vivid memories of that day. Rescuers had dug her out of the rubble of the family home, her tiny body passed from stranger to stranger down a line of people frantically searching for survivors. She had been separated from her family for more than a day. Her parents had thought she was dead, and she had thought she had lost her family forever. It was trauma she’d never really gotten over.

The story had scared Simpson to death when she was a child, but only now did she truly understand how horrifying it was to be in a path of a storm. The sound alone was terrifying. But it was the smell that she noticed the most as the air became rich with the overpowering odor of freshly tilled earth, mowed grass, and lumber. It was a confirmation, as if she needed it, that the tornado was doing major damage as it ravaged its way toward her. She thought of the kids crouched in the hallways, the only shelter they had. She prayed the building would be strong enough to withstand what was coming. Miracles could happen. Her mother was a living, breathing example of one—a tiny child who had survived a deadly tornado.

What was happening seemed so unreal, so alien, as if she were floating outside her body watching someone else’s life. She could not comprehend how the day had turned out like this, the final Monday before school let out for the year, a day that was supposed to be a celebration of the kids and how much they had accomplished, with summer vacation just days away. They had been so close to the end of the day, when most of the kids would have been safe with their parents. Why had the tornado formed so early? Unanswerable questions raced through her head, and she could barely wrap her mind around any of them. The storm was coming, and she had to be ready for whatever would happen now. It was her job, her duty. She was the principal, responsible for everybody in the building, the kids and her staff. She wished she could unleash some protective bubble around them to keep them safe, but there was nothing more she could do. She felt completely helpless.

In the dark Simpson felt the other women trembling in fear around her, scared for their lives. Kristin Atchley, the school’s counselor, was hanging on to one side of the toilet for dear life and began to cite the Lord’s Prayer out loud. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” she said in a shaky voice. Atchley suddenly paused. “I don’t want to die,” she said as she began to weep. By now the others were quietly crying too, listening to the storm approach and wondering if they would live to see the world outside the bathroom walls.

Simpson was terrified too, but she was determined not to allow the fear to overtake her. She pushed it all to the back of her mind, willing herself to be strong and focused for everyone around her. She was strangely calm, as if some other force had taken over to keep her from really thinking about how much she had to lose. As the tornado inched closer, she leaned her forehead on the cool white porcelain of the sink, which began to vibrate from the energy of the monster grinding its way toward her. All she could do was wait and pray that her school could survive this and be ready for what would come next.

 • • • 

Along the east corridor of the school, where the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classes were held, Justin Ayers, a twenty-nine-year-old fifth-grade teacher, had been nervously pacing back and forth between the students sheltering inside and the back door at the end of the hallway that led to a concrete courtyard outside. He kept walking out and peering off toward the west looking for the tornado. By then it was hard to see. At more than a mile wide, it was wrapped in so much rain and debris it simply looked like a massive black veil of darkness as it stretched across what seemed to be the entire sky west of the school. Somewhere in the cloud was the killer tornado, but even though they could hear it, the people directly in front of it couldn’t see it until it was right on top of them.

Suddenly it was there, a few hundred yards away. Ayers saw a house just on the other side of the school’s library suddenly explode in the air as the funnel blasted into it like an unstoppable tank. His heart began to race. Seeing how that house had been so suddenly pulverized, he realized almost instantly that the hallways inside the school would not be enough to protect them from what was coming. He raced as fast as he could back into the building, where he screamed at the top of his lungs at the teachers and students crouched against the walls to get into the bathrooms. “It’s coming! It’s coming,” he yelled, so loud that he could be heard all the way to the front hallway of the building, where first graders, kindergartners, and pre-K classes were huddled.

Paula Fleener, a fourth-grade teacher, jumped to her feet and ran to a bathroom, whose stalls were already crammed with students from another class. Fleener, who at fifty-nine was one of the oldest teachers on staff, grabbed a trash can and hurled it down the hall, quickly making room for her students on the floor near the sinks. She ordered them to crouch and squeeze together with their backpacks over their heads. She then threw her body on top of them, grabbing as many of them as she could underneath her and holding them tight. She thought only of their safety. “I want my mama!” one of her students began to sob as the horrifying roar of the tornado was punctuated by the terrible screech of twisting metal and breaking glass as it began to inhale the neighborhood around them. “I won’t let you go,” Fleener told the boy, squeezing him and her other students even tighter beneath her.

A few feet away her colleague Rhonda Crosswhite, who taught sixth grade, had thrown her body on top of her students inside one of the stalls. She could feel them shaking underneath her. One girl was crying hysterically, her body heaving with sobs. Another boy lifted his head up to look at Crosswhite, his face gripped with fear. “I love you,” he told her, tears running down his face. “Please don’t die with me. I don’t want to die.” Short and blond, Crosswhite, who was forty-four, was a bulldog of a woman, a strong, unfailingly positive mother of three teenage daughters whose voice was so boisterous and loud that she often joked that she had been born with a built-in microphone. She spent her time outside the classroom as a “cheer mom,” a special breed of mother who devoted hours to ferrying her youngest daughter, Abby, and her cheerleading squad all over the state for competitions.

But as the tornado neared, it was Crosswhite who became the cheerleader inside that cramped stall, bucking up her students and refusing to give an inch to a ruthless storm that seemed to have no mercy on any of its victims. “I am
not
going to die today,” Crosswhite declared matter-of-factly, her booming voice louder than the roar of the storm. “I have other things to do in my life, and I’m not going to die, and you’re not going to die. . . . We’re going to be fine. I’m protecting you. We’re not going to die today.” Crosswhite refused to even consider the possibility that the storm would kill them, as if the power of positive thinking would make it go away. Still, she began to pray out loud so her students could hear her, calling on God to protect them, to keep them safe from the destructive tornado.

On the other side of the wall, Janice Brim and her sixth graders were still singing church praise songs that called on God for protection as they sat squeezed in the tiny printer closet. And as the roar of the twister grew louder and louder, Brim and the students raised their voices louder, singing almost at the top of their lungs, as if they were trying to shout the storm away. Brim grabbed the knob of the door to hold it shut, since the lock was broken. She braced her feet in one of the corners of the closet and prepared to hold on tight, hoping she would have enough strength to keep the storm out.

 • • • 

In the back building Jennifer Doan clutched her third graders as close to her as she could. If she could have fit them all under her to protect them, she would have but, small and diminutive with the slightly swollen belly of a woman two months pregnant, she simply couldn’t. On her left was Xavier Delgado. On her right was Porter Trammell and next to him was Nicolas McCabe—nine-year-olds who had been so gleeful earlier in the day celebrating their final week of school before summer vacation. Now they were terrified and sobbing, their tiny bodies shaking in fear. “I don’t want to die,” one of the boys, his voice quivering, told her. Doan, her heart suddenly in her throat, tried her very best not to cry. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” she said again and again, stretching her arms as far as possible to rub the boys’ backs and comfort them.

A few feet away Cheryl Littlejohn, another third-grade teacher, was watching for the tornado from one of the classrooms that faced the west. She suddenly saw the funnel begin to tear at the playground equipment just yards away. Littlejohn ran back into the hallway, screaming for the teachers and kids to get down. Up and down the hallway the children cried and screamed as the tornado began to pummel the building, hurling massive pieces of debris against the roof and walls as if they were under attack. The ground began to rumble like an earthquake, and there was the sound of glass shattering as the windows exploded inside the classrooms from the force of the winds. Within seconds the air became thick with dust and insulation as the storm rattled everything loose. It quickly became hard to breathe.

Second-grade teacher Shelly Calvert, her arms stretched around six kids, peeked up just as the back door at the southern end of the hallway was torn open. She watched in terror as the tornado peeled it away hinge by hinge. A choking cloud of dust and debris swept through the hall as the teachers and kids began to feel their bodies being lifted and sucked by the storm—the unseen hand of a monster dragging them helplessly toward the outside.

As she fought to maintain traction against the storm, Calvert felt for a little girl to her right who had been just beyond her fingertips, so tiny and light she worried the storm might suck her away. Feeling nothing, she peeked up and saw that she was gone. As panic raced through her body, she lifted her head up fully, her body now pummeled by debris, looking for the girl. Feeling something at her back, she turned and saw her, motionless on the ground behind her. She quickly grabbed her, shaking her and yelling her name, and for a second the girl didn’t move and Calvert worried she might be dead. But then she suddenly came to, coughing and crying. Calvert threw her on top of the kids in front of her and leaned down again as the debris flying through the hallway grew bigger and the winds grew fiercer than anything she had ever imagined.
This is it,
she thought. There was no way they could survive this. Images of her husband and kids and granddaughter flashed through her mind. She prayed she would see them again, but as she and the kids began to be battered by rocks and books and anything else the storm could pick up and hurl at them, she began to lose hope. Above them the roof began to disintegrate, pulled apart by the winds of the massive tornado.