A week after a deadly tornado outbreak, families of the victims are still processing the terrible toll.
Authorities on Thursday found the body of a Kentucky teenager who had been missing. Nyssa Brown was the seventh member of her family to die in the tornado that hit Bowling Green last week, and family and neighbors say they are reeling. Elsewhere in Kentucky, Jason Cummins has been gathering mementos from the debris of the home his mom, Marsha Hall, and aunt, Carole Grisham, shared. The sisters were Dawson Springs fixtures who had worked at a funeral home helping others through their grief.
“She said, ‘I cleaned out the closet in case I need to get in there.’” Cummins recalled. “She said, ‘I love you.’ She texted each of my siblings and said she loved them.”Hall was still working at a funeral home, where she arranged flowers and assisted grieving families. Grisham had also worked there in the past as had the sisters’ mother.Beshear Sewell, who owned the funeral home, said Hall was always thinking about what a family would need.
“I don’t know how it’s going to feel the day when I don’t come up here and look for something,” he said. “That’s when I think it will hit me.”Carl Hogan, 60, was “incredibly devoted” to his wife of 41 years, and he was looking forward to getting her back home in Dawson Springs, Kentucky, following a stay in a hospital and nursing home that began in February, said daughter Katie Fields, who lived only a mile or so from her father.
Hogan’s body was located about a day later, and Fields said now she does not want him remembered as “the guy who died in the tornado.” Hogan loved to fish and loved his green Chevrolet truck, she said, and he was a fan of the TV show “Yellowstone.” His four grandchildren “were his world,” she said, and Hogan was a “fantastic” father.___
But he lived alone and had lost friends in recent years. Tony Aiken said his father was “ready to go” and was resigned to the danger of the storm.Huda Alubahi grabbed her two young sons and sheltered in a closet as the tornado bore down on their home in Mayfield, Kentucky. Ward, who was a line leader at the plant, had five sons and two daughters, according to an obituary published by a funeral home. Also known as Joe Marshall Ward, he is survived by his mother and a brother.
” said that all of the sudden they were told that they needed to get back to the hallway or the bathroom and that the tornado was close,” Chism said. “She said they got in there and it wasn’t five minutes after they got into the bathroom. She and her sister went in the first stall. She said, ’The last time I saw your mom she ran into the last stall and took a bunch of people with her. We all laid down and tried to hold on.
“Most of all, I’ll remember how kind he was and how he helped me through the hardest time,” she said. Mitchell had worked for about six years at the nursing home, said Lauren Lloyd, the facility’s administrator. He would often stop by the nurses’ station and other gathering places for staff members, she said, asking co-workers how their day was going.
An online appeal started by Morrow’s fiancee, Chelsea Thomas, said Morrow hoped to become a household name through business ventures including car washes, grocery stores and laundries. He wanted to build housing for low-income families, she wrote.A law firm has announced it will represent relatives of the St. Louis native and is seeking answers about whether employees at the Amazon facility had sufficient warning about the danger of the approaching twister.
“I just held her hand and begged her to hold on, and begged God not to take her,” Hand said. “I said, ‘Babe, I got you, I’m here, please, please.’” “He was the life of the party and loved getting his friends together more than anything,” the obit said. “A friend to Cory was family, and there was no such thing as a stranger to him.”Amazon employee Etheria Hebb, 34, and a co-worker spent the day delivering packages before the weather began turning bad. Then they returned to the company’s warehouse near Edwardsville, Illinois.
The couple from Dawson Springs, Kentucky, were identified by a county coroner as being among those who perished in the deadly tornado outbreak that devastated areas of the Midwest and South. “ could build a house from a matchbook,” Sandy said in an interview with The Associated Press. “You couldn’t go to Walmart with him without a hundred people stopping him. His son was the kid you grew up dreaming to have.”
“Jenny started out driving a bus and she was a teacher’s aide, and she gradually worked her way up to finance director,” Dawson Springs School Superintendent Leonard Whalen recalled. “She was some kind of lady.” Dickey, 62, was among six people killed when an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, was struck. Authorities say both sides of the warehouse used to prepare orders for delivery collapsed inward and the roof caved. Rescuers had to pull survivors from the rubble.
A family member has set up a GoFundMe account for Koon’s family and his mother-in-law, Sheila Rose, who lost her home.Lisa Taylor had worked 14 years as a florist at the same family-owned shop in Memphis, Tennessee, when she left in October to start a new career at the airport with the Transportation Security Administration. Co-workers at Rachel’s Flowers congratulated her with balloons on a sign that read, “Good Luck, Lisa.
But she had a creative spark that made her a natural when it came to working with flowers, Morton said, whether she was helping grieving families design funeral arrangements or using bits and pieces of broken, castoff jewelry to add some custom sparkle to high school girls’ prom corsages. Meanwhile customers were dropping by the shop to offer condolences and leaving notes. One of them read: “Lisa was a light in a dark world.”Annistyn Rackley was an outgoing and energetic 9-year-old who loved swimming, dancing and cheerleading, according to her great-aunt Sandra Hooker.
Hooker called Annistyn a “special angel” and said the girl delighted in donning outfits and makeup for cheer competitions and learning new dances from TikTok. She did cartwheels and splits in front of Hooker. His nephew Mike Hembrey said the Korean War veteran and retired farmer had been in the nursing home since 2016 because of Alzheimer’s disease. But he remembered his uncle as engaged with his extended family throughout their younger years.
“He was physically still in the act of trying to get them to safety. And that’s when it hit,” Workman said. “It takes a tremendous person to be able to lay their own life down for somebody else. But he did and he was doing it for the right reasons.” Crick, 43, was a district judge for Muhlenberg and McLean counties who handled criminal misdemeanor cases, traffic court and juvenile cases, said Circuit Judge Brian W. Wiggins. Wiggins said he had known his fellow judge since 2005, when Crick was a public defender. He later was in private practice before taking the bench in 2011.
Pennington, 52, was working as an assistant manager at a Dollar General store in nearby Leachville, Arkansas, when it was hit.
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