The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (20 page)

Down the hall Doan was hanging on to her kids for dear life. It was all happening so fast, but for a few brief moments it seemed as though it were in slow motion, like a scene from a horror film, with books and papers and pieces of the rapidly crumbling school swirling and suspended in midair. Before she could even grasp what was happening, the walls had caved in, causing everything to go black. The kids who had been within her grasp suddenly seemed to be gone, their warm touch replaced by cold, jagged pieces of concrete and steel.

 • • • 

In the front hallway Karen Marinelli and her colleagues had heard Ayers’s cries warning that the storm was approaching, and they had squeezed their small students even tighter. Marinelli had reached as far as she could around the kids, so far she was touching the teacher next to her. Marinelli had resisted voicing her fears, but as she grabbed her colleague’s hand she couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I’m scared,” she said as she heard the west side of the building begin to creak and crack as the storm devoured it piece by piece. Suddenly the skylights above their heads exploded, spraying glass all over the hallway.

A few feet away Linda Patterson, a pre-K teacher, and her aide, Kaye Johnson, threw their bodies on top of their students as the ceiling began to rain down on them. They were crouched next to Erin Baxter’s class, and in an attempt to keep the kids calm Patterson and Johnson were singing the alphabet song. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G . . .” the teachers sang in unison, raising their voices in an effort to be heard over the storm. Underneath her Patterson heard the tiny, muffled voice of one of her students. “I can’t breathe,” the child said, pushing against her. But Patterson was not about to move. She felt a whoosh of wind at her back as the roof began to peel away. Just as quickly she was being pelted by rocks, cracked plaster, and everything else the storm had gathered up in its maw. The sound was now deafening.

A few feet away Baxter clutched her students closer as she wondered if the building would collapse on top of them. She didn’t dare look up, but she felt things whizzing past her head—boards and ceiling tiles. Her ears suddenly began to pop, and she could hear sounds only in a muted, muffled way, as if she were caught underneath a giant glass jar. Her mind flashed back to the May 3 tornado, when one of her friends had been seriously injured by debris flying through the air. She began to pray out loud for God to keep her students safe and for the storm to go away. “It’s going to be okay! It’s going to be okay!” she yelled. “I love you!” She had no idea if her kids could hear her, but she knew for now they were still alive. She could feel them moving beneath her, but she didn’t know how much longer they could survive like this. The tornado seemed to be parked right on top of them.

A little farther down the hall, Jennifer Simonds, a twenty-six-year-old kindergarten teacher, couldn’t believe what was happening. A native of Naperville, Illinois, Simonds had been through a few thunderstorms since she’d moved to Oklahoma a few years before, but nothing like this. It was like
The Wizard of Oz
mashed up with a horror movie. She felt her body being pummeled and sucked at by the tornado’s winds. It seemed like one big gust of air, and she and her kids would be gone. Only a few minutes earlier she hadn’t even really believed the tornado would hit them. This had to be just a precaution. Why would something so terrible happen to a school? But then she had heard the glass shattering in another part of the building. She quickly stood up and grabbed backpacks off hooks nearby and threw them on top of the six students she had left. “This is going to hurt,” she said, and she dove on top of them, using her body as a shield. Within seconds the heavy concrete cinder blocks of the wall started to crack apart, and she felt them falling one by one on top of her. Simonds began to worry that she was crushing the kids. Like other teachers, she worried more about their safety than her own. They were so young, just five or six. Their lives had barely begun. She was young too, but at least she’d lived a little bit of a life. She began to cry out loud to God, “Take me! Take me! Not my babies!” She repeated it again and again, as the storm lingered above.

Nearby Marinelli felt something unbearably heavy hit the small of her back, and her pelvis and legs were pushed to the ground, almost flat. Her upper body remained tightly wrapped around the three boys from her class, who began to squirm as the world seemed to be collapsing around them. At that moment Marinelli was sure they were going to die. “What’s going on? What’s happening?!” one of the boys cried out. Marinelli tried to respond, but she could barely breathe. Whatever it was that had fallen on them felt like it had cut off part of her flow of oxygen, and her voice came out as a labored whisper. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she repeated. “It’s going to be over soon.” Pain was shooting through her body, and she wondered how much longer she would be able to last.

 • • • 

In the hallway of the back building where the second- and third-grade classes were, Eischen felt her body being sucked up into the air. She clawed at the wall, trying to pull herself back down, worried that the winds lapping at them like a thirsty dog would take one of her kids. She screamed again to God: “Lift it, Lord! Please lift it!”

 • • • 

On the east side of the building near the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms, Janice Brim was using every bit of strength she possessed to keep the door to the closet where she and her students were sheltering closed. They were still singing the words to Psalm 91, shouting them now to be heard above the storm. “I will say of the Lord: He is my refuge and fortress,” they yelled. By now they had sung the hymn a dozen or so times, and as the tornado began to tear through the school, slowly and agonizingly, they sang it even more fervently. Brim could hear the fear in her kids’ voices, but some strange calm had fallen over her. She was prepared to go if the Lord wanted to take her, but she prayed that the storm would spare the kids. In her hand the doorknob began to twist. She struggled to hang on even as it twisted her wrist, spraining it. She ducked her head as the roof above them peeled away, but still she hung on to that door, refusing to let go. “His faithfulness, your sure defense,” she sang.

 • • • 

Back at the front of the building Simpson was still grasping the pedestal sink for dear life. The storm seemed as if it had been over them forever, as if it had purposely stopped for maximum impact. It didn’t seem to be moving. She and the three other women were crammed so tightly into that bathroom that there was barely an inch of distance between them, but somehow debris was filling in that space—rocks and dust and parts of the ceiling. Waiting for the tornado to hit had been excruciating, and for some reason Simpson had found herself narrating out loud what she believed to be happening outside the bathroom door, like a play-by-play announcer. “It’s hitting the library,” she’d said matter-of-factly when she heard it tear into the west side of the building. She thought it would move through quickly—that’s what most tornadoes did. But it just sat there, and Simpson began to slowly bang her forehead against the porcelain sink, almost like a personal countdown. “It’s almost over. It’s almost over. It’s almost over,” she said again and again. Outside the door it sounded like the building was imploding. Crash after crash. She ached to get out of the bathroom and to the kids. She knew from the terrifying sounds that her school had been ripped apart, though she didn’t have any idea how badly. But it wouldn’t go away.

Simpson had tried to be so calm, to keep it together for her colleagues who were screaming in terror. Suddenly she couldn’t control it anymore. “In God’s name, go away!” she shouted. “Leave! Go away!” She repeated her cry again and again, maybe eight times, and suddenly she felt a rush of chilly air hit her. The roof above her had been ripped off, and as she peered up she saw right into the heart of the monster storm as it swirled above the school. It felt unreal, almost like a movie. She watched as pieces of boards, insulation, and other debris swirled hundreds of feet in the air above.

Something inexplicable came over her—some presence that took the fear away. It suddenly stopped being bad for her. She had to get out of that bathroom. The kids needed her. Her staff needed her. Plaza needed her. And as Simpson looked up again, she suddenly saw a patch of blue sky. It was finally over.

A
few blocks east of Plaza Towers, Julie Molotsky had just reached her house on Kings Manor Drive when she saw the tornado in the distance. She had picked up her two grandsons—Jacob, six, and Caden, two—from school and day care. Her daughter, Heather, had called her from work less than a half hour earlier, worried about reports of a tornado on the ground. Her son-in-law, Travis, was a Moore police officer, and he couldn’t pick up the kids because he’d been called into work in anticipation of a storm emergency.

Molotsky didn’t have a storm shelter, but one of her neighbors did, and she was sure they’d let her and the boys crowd in. The family had hit a rough patch recently, and she had helped out with money and food. She wasn’t a rich woman, but she believed in helping others. That’s just what you did. It was how she’d been raised.

A tiny creek and park divided her neighborhood from the housing addition that surrounded Plaza Towers, and as she looked west she was horrified to see massive pieces of debris sailing in the air. The tornado was so wide at that point, it seemed to swallow the entire sky. She could see nothing but the storm. She ran in fear to her neighbor’s backyard with her grandsons and began beating on the door, which was locked and sealed from the inside. Through a tiny vent she heard her neighbor’s voice, someone she’d helped out so often. They wouldn’t open the door. The storm was too close, and they didn’t have enough room. Molotsky was stunned. She beat on the door again. “Please!” she begged, the tornado now perilously close. There was no response.

Running out of time, Molotsky grabbed her grandsons and ran toward the back fence. She was almost certain that another neighbor, one she didn’t know as well, had a shelter. With tree limbs and other debris now sailing past her head, the forty-seven-year-old grandmother kicked down a wooden stockade fence and was relieved to see that there was shelter a few houses away. She grabbed the boys and ran as fast as she could. Beating on the door, she prayed it would open, and it did, just as the twister began devouring homes a few doors down the street.

A few blocks north Terri Long had pulled into a 7-Eleven store at the corner of SW Fourth Street and Telephone Road. She called her daughter Alyson and told her where she was. She was taking shelter with the store’s employees and a young mother and her four-month-old baby, who had tried to outrace the storm but couldn’t. Long didn’t sound worried, and the call was brief. She told her daughter she loved her and hung up. It was the last time Alyson Costilla ever spoke to her mother. The tornado had been heading due east, but it lurched a few blocks to the north as it approached Interstate 35 and made a direct hit on the convenience store, killing Long; twenty-nine-year-old Megan Futrell; and Futrell’s four-month-old son, Case.

Futrell, a special-education teacher at Highland West Junior High who was known for her beaming smile and thick mane of curly blond hair, had left school early to run and pick up her son from day care ahead of the storm. Her husband, Cody, had raced to pick up their older son, Kanon, from school. They had planned to meet back home, but Megan never made it. She pulled over when a hailstorm made it impossible for her to see out of her car’s front window and decided to ride out the tornado inside the 7-Eleven. Rescuers who ran to the store after the storm had passed were combing through the debris when the saw the tiny foot of a baby. He was dead, cradled tight in the arms of his mother, who was also gone. The sight was so terrible that many of the rescuers, police officers and several civilians, were too distraught to go on.

The tornado continued east, heedless of the carnage in its wake. It made a direct hit on the Moore Medical Center, picking up dozens of mangled cars from nearby parking lots and throwing them in jagged piles near the building’s front door. Amazingly, no one died there, and there were no major injuries. Right next door the Warren Theatre, the most recognizable landmark in Moore, also took a direct hit, but aside from having its awning torn apart and some roof damage, it too withstood the tornado’s 200-mile-per-hour winds.

At KOCO, Damon Lane was now certain that his home was going to take a direct hit from the storm. On air Chance Coldiron, one of his storm chasers, was showing live video of the tornado, black and menacing as it prepared to cross Interstate 35. The hospital had taken a direct hit, he said, and the storm seemed to be reorganizing, moving a little toward the northeast. Lane quickly texted his wife, Melissa, who was in their underground shelter with their two dogs, having managed to drag down Skylar. “The tornado is going to pass right over,” he warned.

 • • • 

In south Oklahoma City near 149th and May, not far from where the tornado had begun, Anthony Connel had finally reached his house—or what was left of it. As he had feared, it was completely leveled—as were most of the homes on his block. Everything was gone, including his two donkeys and his restored cherry red Road Runner parked in the garage. He hadn’t heard from his wife, who was still at school at Southmoore—which was close to the path of the tornado. As it began to rain, Connel started going through the debris, trying to salvage what belongings he could. He found some guns and several of the vintage shaving kits that he collected.

Right in the middle of the debris Connel discovered his old solid-oak rocking chair. There wasn’t a scratch on it. He pulled it out and took it down the driveway, where he instructed his seventy-seven-year-old neighbor, Gene Tripp, to sit down. Connel watched him and thought about how unfair life could be. Tripp’s wife, Billye, had died just a few weeks before. They’d been married for fifty-six years and loved each other until the end like young teenagers. Tripp had barely been able to deal with her death, and now he’d lost everything—all of their belongings and their home. The only thing he really cared about in the house, Tripp told Connel, was her wedding ring, which had been on a shelf in their bedroom when the storm hit. Now it was probably lost forever. As they spoke, a photographer from the local newspaper happened on the scene and took Tripp’s picture, which ultimately became an enduring image of the storm—an old man serenely sitting in a rocking chair in a landscape of endless destruction.

 • • • 

Down the road Lando Hite had dug himself out of a pit of debris at the Celestial Acres horse facility on the grounds of the Orr Family Farm. His shirt and shoes had been ripped off by the winds, and his pants would have been too, had it not been for his giant belt buckle. He was covered head to toe in mud, and he wiped the dirt out of his eyes so that he could see. What greeted him was total apocalypse. Almost every building in sight had been leveled, and there were horses, dozens of them, lying dead on the ground. Some had been thrown on top of buildings; others were tangled in power lines that has been ripped apart and tied into knots by the ferocious winds. Those that weren’t dead were barely alive—stunned and bloodied by the horrific storm. Some had been impaled by boards and tree limbs. A mother and her filly, battered and bruised, stood huddled together, barely moving. It was the most horrible thing Hite had ever seen. And while he was grateful to be alive, he felt sick. All those innocent horses, majestic animals he had cared for and spent more time with than any other human being. All he could do was stand there stunned. Why had this happened?

 • • • 

LaDonna Cobb had no idea how long she had been unconscious. She awoke in what remained of a first-grade classroom at Briarwood Elementary, half buried under a heavy cinder-block wall with jagged bits of steel rebar poking through the cracks. She heard the voices of children beneath her screaming, including her youngest daughter, Erin. “Mom! Mom! Wake up!” she was yelling. Cobb felt dazed, and her head and face were pounding. She felt blood trickling down the back of her neck. What had happened to her?

She could barely open her eyes. One seemed to be swollen shut. But as she forced her eyes open, she could see Erin beneath her. Her daughter looked like a ghost, almost translucent. Cobb suddenly thought she was dead, having some sort of out-of-body experience where she was looking at the world she had left behind. But then she felt a shooting pain in her head and a feeling that she was about to suffocate. She was very much alive. The wall was crushing her. Her body was bearing all of its weight, hundreds of pounds. She was the only thing keeping it from falling on top of the kids, and she suddenly realized she wouldn’t be able to bear the weight much longer. She began yelling, which was hard because she could barely catch her breath. “Crushed!” she managed to yell. “I’m being crushed!” She had no idea what was beyond the wall, if anyone was there to help her or the kids. She had no idea what the tornado had done, what it had left behind.

Suddenly she felt movement. Someone was trying to lift the wall, and after a few seconds it budged. It was her husband, Steve. Using all of his strength, he picked it up enough so that she and the kids could scramble out from underneath it. Her head felt cloudy and hazy, but suddenly things came into terrifying focus. The classroom around her was obliterated. The roof was gone; the walls had collapsed; the windows were blown out. As she struggled to her feet, she could see out into the open pathways that linked the separate classroom pods. It looked like the building had been picked up and crushed like a soda can. Everything was ripped apart or had collapsed. It was total devastation. Her heart raced with terror. She was sure that kids and teachers were dead. How could anyone have survived something like this? What had happened to their other two girls? Were they alive?

Cobb looked at her husband, who was battered and bloody. Her face was pounding, and she reached up and brushed her fingertips over its left side. It was numb and tender to the touch. She knew it was swollen by the way she could feel the rapid pounding of her heart in her face. She didn’t know it, but her cheekbone was broken. She was covered in blood, which continued to ooze down her neck from a wound somewhere.

As they climbed out of the classroom, Steve, LaDonna, and Erin stumbled across a literal wasteland. There was destruction in every direction. It smelled like gas and electricity and wet earth. The cars in the parking lot had been sucked away, crushed, and thrown into a nearby field. All of the houses to the east of the school had been completely leveled, reduced to piles of boards and bricks. On the roof of one of the classrooms was a giant tank, the size of a gas truck without the wheels. How had it gotten there? Emotions were running high. There were people stumbling around in shock. Parents were running up to the school from the neighborhood, frantically looking for their kids. And those who emerged from the rubble of the school were received with a mix of tears and stunned disbelief. It was like a bad dream.

A teacher ran up. She was carrying Jordan, the Cobbs’ middle daughter, whose leg had been injured by falling bricks. As Steve grabbed her and cradled her, Jordan looked over his shoulder and saw how badly injured her mother was. She began to wail. “My mom! Somebody help my mom! She’s going to die!” Jordan screamed. As they walked around searching for their oldest daughter, Cydney, LaDonna tried to soothe her. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she told her. “I’m hurt, but I’ll be all right. I’m alive. We’re all alive.” By then Cydney had emerged unscathed from the flattened school, having ridden out the storm in a bathroom. It was a miracle, Cobb thought. They had all made it. Her girls were crying and scared but fine. Looking back at the wreck of the building, she hoped there would be other miracles.

And there were. One by one over the next few minutes, students and teachers slowly emerged from the rubble of Briarwood. Some were injured, but the majority weren’t. They scaled walls and climbed through broken windows to escape the destruction of their classrooms. Near the demolished front office, Shelly McMillin, the principal, saw the faces of her staff, some dirtied and bloodied, as they led their kids out of the building into what had been the parking lot. Scared but relieved, her staff one by one told her that their students were badly shaken but mostly unscathed. There were some injuries, including a teacher whose leg had been impaled on the leg of a chair. But everybody so far seemed to be okay. McMillin could barely believe it, and she silently began to thank God. She looked at her school and wondered how anyone could have made it out alive, but one by one they did. She prayed that the miracles would continue.

Before heading back into the building to look for students, McMillin pulled out her cell phone to call Robert Romines, her friend and the soon-to-be superintendent of Moore Public Schools, but he was suddenly there. Romines and Horn had finally made it, weaving their truck down roads that were nearly impassable, covered with downed telephone poles and trees and other debris. He had run the last few blocks in a panic, and as he walked up to McMillin, he looked at the school and then to her, a stunned, questioning look on his face. It was his worst nightmare come true. Looking at the building, he was certain people were dead, and as they ran inside, his cell phone, which had stopped working, briefly came back to life. It was a text message from Avery, his youngest daughter, whose school had come within blocks of being hit by the tornado. “Daddy, I’m scared,” she wrote. Romines, who had willed himself to keep it together, felt tears begin to run down his face as he quickly tapped out a message. “It’s going to be okay,” he wrote. “Daddy’s okay. Mama’s okay.” But the truth was he didn’t know his wife’s fate. She worked at an elementary school on the east side of town, and though he believed the storm had stayed to the south of her location, he didn’t know for sure, and he’d been unable to reach her.

 • • • 

By then, KWTV was broadcasting the first images of the storm damage, shaky images of destroyed homes and roads covered in debris near Briarwood. Looking at it, Gary England felt sick, but he tried to remain focused. The tornado was still on the ground about 2 miles to the northeast near Interstate 35. But it was so rain wrapped and shrouded in debris that no one could see it. All the live video coming in just showed a giant fog on the ground. The power flashes around the storm—usually a telltale sign that it was on the ground—had slowed down, but that didn’t necessarily mean it had lifted. It could have been that the fierce winds ahead of the storm had taken the lines out. No one knew. But on the radar the storm appeared to be weakening a bit, and England hoped against hope that the tornado was done. Just in case, he began to call out streets and locations heading east and northeast in Moore and beyond—including towns that had been hit by a tornado less than twenty-four hours before. They were again in the path of danger.