The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (24 page)

By then the pain was so great that Doan began to fade in and out of consciousness. She looked up at the sky and noticed it was a bright blue. She had never seen the sky so beautiful. It betrayed no hints of the horror that had been unleashed only an hour or so before. She thought of her unborn child and hoped the baby was still alive. As she turned her head, she saw the rescue workers place another one of her students, Kai Heuangpraseuth, on the ground nearby. He was covered in mud and pieces of rock, and his eyes were closed, but suddenly he turned to her and asked if he was okay. Doan had never been so happy to know that someone was alive.

 • • • 

Deep inside the rubble Lindy Simpson and other rescue workers were frantically digging. Their efforts were mixed with hope and heartache. For a few minutes every child they found alive was followed by one who was dead. Buried beyond Doan they found another girl, tangled in a mess of steel rebar but alive. Digging deeper, they found three more kids, all wedged together, still crouched in their tornado positions underneath the rock of the collapsed wall. Two were alive; the third was dead. Nearby they dug out two more little girls, who appeared to be holding hands. But it was too late. They were gone. Some of the rescue workers were overcome and forced to step away to regain their composure. Many had dealt with fatalities before—some from the previous tornadoes that had hit Moore. But they had never seen anything as terrible as this.

At the base of the pile Amy Simpson watched as several more banged-up kids were pulled out over the next several minutes—including three more from Doan’s class. But then nothing. By then the number of rescue workers gathered outside the back building had easily tripled. Again and again police officials pressed Simpson on how many kids she believed might be left. By then there were only a handful of parents left. Four were at the scene, and she knew of two or three more families who had raced to the hospital thinking their children might be there. She told workers it had to be fewer than ten still inside the building, but her answer was greeted with skepticism. In the crowd she continued to hear wild estimates—as many as fifty kids still missing. But Simpson insisted it couldn’t be true. She would have seen more family members. Even if the roads were blocked or they had been injured, as a mother herself she knew that nothing would stop parents from trying to get to their kids.

As she argued with police, some of the remaining parents began to approach her, anguish etched in their faces. “Where is my baby?” a mother tearfully asked her. Simpson’s heart ached. By then they had started to push the crowd farther back from the pile. She’d overheard someone say it was now a “recovery mission” rather than a “rescue mission.” As the wife of a firefighter, she knew exactly what that meant. As her husband reappeared at the top of the pile, the grim look on his face told her everything she needed to know. Her kids were dead. It was her worst nightmare come true. She felt so helpless, and as she surveyed the frantic faces of the few remaining parents, she longed to do something, anything, for them.

Simpson walked to what remained of the back building and began to climb up the mountain of debris, her sandals slipping on the jagged pieces of rock. No one stopped her, and when she reached the top, she peered over into what used to be the second- and third-grade hallway and saw a glimpse of a blanket covering something on the ground. A body? Suddenly she felt a hand on her arm yanking her back. It was Lindy. “I want to see,” she told him. She wanted to identify the kids for their parents. It wouldn’t bring them peace, but at least it would be an answer. “You don’t want to see this,” he told her. “You don’t want that image in your head.” Simpson, who had tried so hard to keep it together, suddenly lost it. She began yelling at her husband, who, along with another officer who had approached, tried to explain what the protocol would be moving forward. She was so angry, she barely listened. She didn’t care about the rules. All she wanted to do was help those parents. “I am sorry. I love you, but your rules suck,” Simpson told her husband.

 • • • 

Ambulances were still unable to make it into the neighborhood, so volunteers loaded Doan into the back of a four-wheeler, driving her half a mile to the Abundant Life Church, where she was transferred into the back of a pickup truck that would drive her to an ambulance. In the back of the truck a nurse began to cut her clothes away, and though she was dazed from the pain, the teacher was conscious enough to be horrified at being so exposed in front of people she did not know. She could see a total stranger in the truck bed opposite her, a man who was injured too. She had never seen him before, and she was never to see him again. Within minutes she was being off-loaded into an ambulance, and she told the EMTs that she was pregnant. “Eight weeks,” she said. They told her they wouldn’t be able to find out the health of her baby until she was at the hospital.

Back at Plaza Towers Doan’s fiancé, Nyle, had just arrived. He had raced from Edmond when he saw footage of the tornado nearing Moore and had made it as close as he could to NW Twelfth Street before abandoning his car in the gridlock of traffic heading south into the city. He sprinted the last 2 miles, frantic to find his fiancée. When he finally made it to the neighborhood, he turned the corner and saw the rubble of Plaza Towers. He feared the worst. How could anyone have made it out of that building alive? But somehow she had, and soon he was rushing to his car and then on to the hospital to meet her.

In the emergency room at the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City, doctors told Doan she had a fractured sternum and spine. But there was good news: Despite all the trauma her body had been through that afternoon, an ultrasound still detected her baby’s heartbeat. By then Doan had been installed in a giant body brace to keep her still. The only movement was on her face, where tears began to flow down her cheeks.

 • • • 

Back in Moore the grim news that kids were likely dead at Plaza Towers was beginning to circulate—though the numbers were still wildly off. A few yards away from where Simpson and the families stood, Lance West, a veteran KFOR reporter, went live with what he’d just been told by a source on the scene. At least two dozen kids were dead inside the school. He could barely get the words out before he started to sob.

Less than a mile away Robert Romines had driven over to the city’s main firehouse off Telephone Road. He had been to Highland East Junior High, where the gym had been wiped out but there had been no major injuries. Next door the administration building was a total loss, but no one had died. He had been unable to find his boss, Susie Pierce, the city’s outgoing superintendent, and he’d come to the firehouse, having heard she might be there. But Pierce was nowhere to be seen.

As he started to walk out the door, Romines was stopped by Robert Crain, an old high-school friend who was the city’s assistant fire chief. “Robert, are you okay?” Crain asked him. Romines told him he was still in shock, but he thought they were going to be okay.

Crain gave him a concerned look. “Have you been to Plaza Towers?” he asked.

Romines froze. “No,” he said, an edge in his voice. “Why?”

Crain put a hand on his shoulder and suggested he’d better sit down. Romines’s heart began to race, and he felt sick. He suddenly knew what was coming. He took a seat.

“How many?” he asked, trying to keep his composure.

Crain paused. “Fifty-one,” he finally said.

Romines felt as if the air had been sucked from his lungs, and for several seconds he sat there and said nothing. Crain asked if he needed anything. “Just give me a minute. Just walk away and give me a minute,” Romines told him.

Crain stood up and stepped away, and as he did, Romines leaned over, put his face his hands, and began to cry.

A
s night fell at Plaza Towers Elementary, scores of additional rescue workers descended on the twisted remains of the school, including military search teams from nearby Tinker Air Force Base. With the power out in much of Moore, massive floodlights running on portable generators were positioned around the perimeter, lighting up sections of the site like a Friday-night football game. Cast against the pitch-black darkness of the neighborhood, the effect was eerie and haunting as the lights cast shadows that made the already horrific ruins look even more grotesque. The dull thuds of sledgehammers pounding again and again into the jagged slabs of concrete and brick pierced the night, competing with the distinctive sizzle of the welding torches that crews were using to cut through thick pieces of steel beams left torn and twisted by the storm.

The air was warm and moist and still smelled of natural gas and disturbed earth. And now, as workers broke apart the school piece by piece looking for more bodies, an ugly, stale scent began to rise up with giant plumes of dust. On the mountain of rubble that surrounded what used to be the back building at Plaza Towers, where the second- and third-grade classrooms had been, a line of rescue workers snaked down the side, passing down buckets of debris one by one. Near the base of the pile a handler walked with a search dog trained to sniff out bodies, alive or dead. It was one of several canines meticulously combing through the scene. Occasionally a deep howl would come from one of the dogs inside the school, and activity would come to a dead stop as workers ran to dig and see if the dog had found something or someone. But repeatedly it was a false alarm.

As the hours ticked by, another sound began to echo through the night, this one more horrific. It was the anguished screams of some of the parents of the missing kids. A yellow police line now kept them from getting too close to the debris, but some paced nearby, calling out the names of their children in the hope that their voices might stir something deep within that giant pile of rubble. And when they weren’t shouting toward the building, they were yelling into the surrounding darkness. Maybe the tornado had sucked their children away and spit out their bodies in spots that hadn’t been noticed yet. Storms were known to suck up young kids and drop them, alive, someplace else. It had happened on May 3, 1999, when a ten-month-old baby had been torn out of her mother’s arms by the tornado. Feared dead, the little girl had been found more than a hundred yards from her house, facedown but alive, in a muddy ditch. Everybody remembered “Mud Baby,” as she had become known, and fourteen years later parents here clung to the hope that maybe, just maybe, they would have their own miracle.

A few yards away Amy Simpson stood and listened to their grieved cries. She was covered in mud, and there were still pieces of insulation stuck in her long blond hair from when the roof of her office bathroom had been ripped away. But she didn’t notice any of it. Her entire focus was on the parents whose babies were missing. Around her she heard the rescue workers speak of missing bodies and the potential for more children concealed inside the obliterated building. But she was certain there were only seven left, all third graders. She knew who they were from the families on the scene and the word of others who had gone to the hospital searching, just in case. Simpson knew there were bodies in the school, and she knew, just by looking at her husband’s face, that these children were gone. But still she could say nothing. Officials on the scene wouldn’t let her. It wasn’t protocol, they said. She hated protocol. Protocol only seemed to be causing the parents more pain.

Simpson’s heart ached as she heard the parents’ tormented cries, but there were no tears. That invisible cloak of whatever it was that had helped her maintain control still enveloped her, keeping the worst of her emotions in check. Kids were dead. Her school was gone. The absolute worst thing she could ever imagine as an educator had happened. And she had not even begun to consider what other terrible things the tornado had done to her city. The neighborhood around her was in ruins. She knew that many kids at her school, even if they had survived, had probably lost everything else. Some of the parents had no homes to return to, but she knew it didn’t matter. It was just stuff that could be replaced, as long as you had your family. Simpson didn’t cry. She couldn’t. Not yet. There was too much to do.

Even as she kept vigil outside the ruins of the back building, the tiny bodies of the children who had died had already been moved to another part of the school. One by one they had been carried into the demolished remains of what had been the school cafeteria. They were covered in blankets and guarded by several police officers. The state medical examiner’s office was on the way with body bags. Seven of them. Blue, rubbery capsules that were designed for adults, not children. And they were bringing more. Wild numbers continued to circulate about the number of missing, and since there was no official list of who had been at school and who had checked out early, rescue workers planned to dig through the night.

Well before the sun had gone down, bickering had started between local police and firefighters and state officials over how to handle the identification of the children’s bodies. Some suggested bringing the parents into the school, but that seemed treacherous, given the damage to the building and the fact that there was no power. And it also seemed especially cold. Should the parents see their kids in that kind of setting? Others pressed for the children to be taken to Oklahoma City, where the identification could be made at the medical examiner’s office—but that led to a debate over how to get the parents there. Others wondered if the bodies should be moved somewhere closer, to another building in Moore. But where? Most of the town was without power.

The debate dragged on for hours. By then Moore officials had called in Jack Poe, a retired Oklahoma City police chaplain. At seventy-two he was a gruff but gentle bear of a man who had worked some of the state’s worst tragedies, including the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The five-thousand-pound truck bomb, which blew off the entire northern front of the building, had killed 168 people, including 19 kids—most of them toddlers in a day-care center positioned right above where the bomb had been detonated. It was the worst terrorist attack on domestic soil until 9/11, and Poe still frequently thought about the families who’d lost relatives in the bombing, especially the parents of the youngest victims. Even though most knew the worst had happened, given the proximity of the bomb, it had still been one of the hardest days of his life telling parents their children were gone.

When he’d retired from the Oklahoma City Police Department, Poe, who had moved to Moore, had agreed to work on a volunteer basis when his new hometown needed him. He lived right next door to Amy Simpson. Her husband and kids had ridden out the storm in his storm shelter, and when Lindy Simpson had raced to Plaza Towers, Poe and his wife had watched his son and daughter until Simpson’s parents could come pick them up. Poe had hoped he wouldn’t be called into service that night, but after seeing how big the tornado had been, he had an ominous feeling that he would.

Poe arrived to a chaotic scene. Moments of tragedy and destruction almost always were muddled and confused, but this one seemed especially frantic and disorganized. No one knew exactly how many kids had been in the school, and reports were all over the place about how many kids were missing. Simpson, whom he knew and trusted, told him that she was sure it was only seven kids because there were only seven families still looking. But others raised the question of parents who were perhaps buried in the rubble of their own homes or couldn’t get to the school site. It was complete turmoil. Both he and Simpson knew what the parents still did not know, or at least had not been formally told: Their kids were dead.

By 10:30
P.M
., officials on the scene suggested that the parents relocate down the block to Abundant Life Church to await word of their children. The church had no power, so they sat there in the dark, waiting and waiting. By then the parents were starting to become angry. Why had there been no word of their kids? What was going on? Why had they been told nothing? Officials were still uncertain how to move forward with the identifications, but they realized they needed to at least begin the process. Poe was tasked with telling the parents they needed to help compile identifying details about their kids—the color of their hair and their eyes, birthmarks, and what they had been wearing to school that day. If some had pictures, they’d take them. As Poe broke the news, some of the parents began wailing in anguish while others became angry. Why? Why had this happened? one father asked. Others simply stood there in shock, too stunned to say anything. For the first time they realized it was no longer a rescue operation.

One mother approached Simpson with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know what to write, Mrs. Simpson,” the woman said in a stunned voice. Simpson knew most of her students by their names and faces and had seen most of them at school that day. She began describing the kids to the shocked parents, who wrote down the information on an official form that had been handed out. No one carried hard photos of their kids anymore, so Simpson used her iPhone to take pictures of their iPhone pictures of their kids, which she gave to police to give to the medical examiner. The little sister of one of the victims had her school yearbook, which she loaned to the medical examiner’s office to help them identify the missing kids. The little girl did not know her yearbook was going to be used to identify the bodies of her older sister and her classmates. It broke Simpson’s heart, but still she did not cry.

 • • • 

At the OU Medical Center Jennifer Doan woke up in her hospital bed. She was in a massive neck and back brace because of the injuries to her spine. She and her fiancé, Nyle, had finally been reunited, and her baby was still alive, which was a miracle considering her injuries. She wanted to know about her students at Plaza Towers, but no one would tell her. Nyle had unplugged the television in her room. He did not want her to worry.

Twenty miles away Erin Baxter, a kindergarten teacher at Plaza Towers, was at her home in Norman when she first saw footage of the tornado that had hit her school. For hours she had avoided it, but finally, as the local television stations entered their eighth hour of uninterrupted storm coverage, she watched a replay of the storm as it approached her school. She was horrified, and inside she felt the suffocating fear all over again, the worry that the storm was going to take her life away. Baxter quickly flipped off the television. When she tried to go sleep, she couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the tornado all over again and was overcome by fear. She could barely bring herself to sleep for the next three weeks.

 • • • 

Around midnight there was still no word from officials on the scene at Plaza Towers. By then the police had commandeered a bus and driven the parents to the First Baptist Church, right off Interstate 35 on the north side of town. It had long been a symbol of strength in the community, a gathering spot after every storm. The church had taken a direct hit during the May 3 tornado, but aside from damage to its steeple, it remained standing. Some had come to see it as an example of Moore’s resilience in storm after storm.

Amy and Lindy Simpson followed the bus in his truck and sat waiting with the families for another ninety minutes. By then several other Moore Public Schools officials, including Susie Pierce, were at the church. The building was somber and quiet, but it was busy. In the main auditorium some of the pews were filled with sleeping people, Moore residents who had lost their homes and had nowhere else to go. Disaster-relief agencies were setting up in the parking lot. Everybody knew what to do. This wasn’t their first tornado in Moore.

The Plaza Towers families had been taken into individual private rooms, where they were being comforted by church staff and other local pastors who had driven in from all over the region to help. While they still had not been told of their kids’ fate, Poe had been on the phone already, dealing with what he knew would be the most difficult task the parents would face: burying their kids. He knew that many of the parents didn’t have the money to cover the cost of a funeral, and he’d started calling around to old friends to see who could handle helping to bury the children. Quickly, without even knowing the numbers, several funeral directors offered to handle the task for free.

 • • • 

Ten blocks away at City Hall, Steve Eddy and other city officials were still at work in the basement. It was a hum of professionalism. They’d been through this before, and even in the darkness city employees were out removing debris from the roads and trying to get traffic lights working again. None had paused to mourn or question why another deadly tornado had hit Moore again. It was their job to get the city going again, and that was their primary focus.

Around town scores of police had been dispatched to the hard-hit neighborhoods to guard against potential looters. Already people from outside Moore had been arrested trying to ransack damaged houses. Some residents weren’t taking chances. They’d set up tents in the front yards of their demolished homes, taking turns sleeping and guarding what they had left—even as more thunderstorms were predicted in the morning.

Eddy was calm and unflappable. Unlike in 1999, when he’d driven around the city feeling panicked and wondering how they would ever rebuild, he was absolutely certain without even knowing the full scale of the damage that Moore could rebuild. Part of him could not believe another tornado had wiped out his city again. But the contracts were already signed for crews to pick up debris. They even had replacement tornado sirens ready to install. It was still spring, after all.

Eddy had barely had time to think of the storm in personal terms. He hadn’t yet talked to his wife, but he knew she was okay. A disaster coordinator with the Red Cross, she’d been out of town that day. She’d tried to call him but hadn’t been able to get through. But somehow Eddy’s daughter, who lived in Washington, D.C., had managed to reach him on the phone and posted an update on Facebook telling rest of the family her father was alive.