The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

by Holly Bailey

  After a while Romines made his way back to the parking lot, where Shelly McMillin came to tell him that it appeared that everyone in the school had been accounted for. Though rescue workers were doing another scan of the school, just to be safe, it appeared that, aside from a few serious injuries, everyone had made it out alive. Romines couldn’t believe it. He turned back and stared at the school in shock. The building was so badly decimated that he wondered how anyone could have made it out alive. It was nothing short of miraculous.

  But his sense of relief was only momentary. He had still not heard from his wife, and word suddenly came that the school administration building had taken a direct hit. With everyone at Briarwood accounted for, he and Jeff Horn ran to their truck and headed back east to check on their colleagues and on Highland East Junior High, near the administration building, which had also been hit. Cell service was still spotty, but they knew from another staffer and from reports on the radio that the tornado had also struck Plaza Towers. After seeing what had happened at Briarwood, how everyone had walked away from that leveled building, Romines allowed himself to believe that everybody had made it out at Plaza Towers too. He did not dare think otherwise.

  CHAPTER 21

  3:45 P.M. TO 6:00 P.M., MAY 20

  Jennifer Doan had lost all concept of time. She had no idea how long she’d been buried in the darkness of the rubble. Sharp pain continued to shoot through her body, and she increasingly found it difficult to breathe. She began to wonder how much longer she had left and whether anyone was coming. She tried to shout, but she could barely gather the breath to raise her voice, and even then she wondered how much could be heard beyond the pile of concrete that imprisoned her.

  She could still feel just one of her students—Porter Trammell, who was growing more anxious by the second. He began to cry and scream, and she tried to keep him calm, telling him that someone was coming for them—though she didn’t know if it was really true. Every time he moved, Doan felt a sharp pain go through her body. She knew she was hurt badly, but what exactly was wrong she had no idea. She feared for the life of the baby inside her. Part of her wanted Porter to be still, so that she could preserve her strength and her breath. Who knew how much oxygen they had left? But at the same time she feared the moments when he became too quiet. She was terrified of what the silence meant, and of the fate of her other students, whose muffled cries had slowly faded away in the minutes after the storm. Doan could deal with the pain of the boy fidgeting if it meant knowing he was still with her.

  A few feet away Emily Eischen and Shelly Calvert, who had also taken shelter in the hallway with their classes, were considering their options for getting out with their kids when they heard footsteps scrambling on the debris above them. It was a group of men, Lindy Simpson among them, and as the rescuers peered over into what had essentially become a pit, the women were relieved. They tearfully motioned down the hall, pointing to the wall where they believed that Jennifer Doan and the third graders were buried. The rescue workers first wanted to clear out the kids who weren’t trapped, and the only way out was to lift them up and over a concrete wall, where they would then be passed along a human chain down the mountain of debris. The women began handing the kids over, lifting them up until it was their turn to escape.

  When Eischen emerged from the pit, she found herself in a world she no longer recognized. Everything was gone. It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped and had blown everything to bits. The air smelled strongly of gas, and just yards away she saw a giant fireball that she soon recognized was a house engulfed entirely in flames. As the human chain of volunteers began to help her down the pile of debris, she burst into tears, but then she saw the faces of her students and she knew she’d have to steel herself. It was her responsibility to get the kids to safety, and as she reached the ground, she led them to the parking lot, which had been wiped clean of cars. Everywhere panicked parents were running up looking for their kids. Some were reunited quickly, but others wandered around, screaming their children’s names in the most anguished voices she’d ever heard. It was like a terrible dream. Suddenly, in the distance, Eischen saw her husband running toward her, and when he reached her, she threw herself at him, embracing him like never before. She didn’t want to let go, but she needed to get her students to safety. Together they began marching down Eagle Drive toward the Abundant Life Church, which had been designated as a place for parents to go to find their kids.

  • • •

  At KOCO Damon Lane had still not heard from his wife. When the tornado lifted, he turned over coverage to his colleagues as he frantically began calling and texting her, praying that she would respond. He kept receiving an “All circuits are busy” message—service was still down. He couldn’t reach his neighbors either, and he had not heard from Chance Coldiron, who had dropped off the storm chase to try to reach his own house, which he believed had been hit. Lane glanced up and saw helicopter footage from one of the rival stations on a nearby television monitor, and his heart dropped. The damage in Moore was horrifying. Highland East Junior High, less than a mile west of his house, had been hit.

  Lane suddenly felt helpless. Though the tornado had lifted, the storm was still threatening, and he knew his job wasn’t over. He walked back on camera, realizing he had never given the all clear to viewers in Moore. It was now safe to come out of the shelters, he told them, but he cautioned them that the city had been hard hit. The world they would emerge into might be dramatically different from the one they had left just an hour before.

  Lane felt something take over. He began to talk directly to residents of his adopted hometown, speaking with the air of a coach who refuses to let his team give up on itself. “Moore, I know we have just gone through one incredible situation. We will recover. Okay? I know, Moore, there’s a lot going on right now. . . . We will recover.” Lane had been speaking off camera, and suddenly he marched back in front of the weather map and looked directly into the lens as if he were peering directly into the eyes of viewers at home. “I am very familiar with Moore. It is my home. It is where I have called home for the last four years,” he continued, an edge in his voice. “I know we have gone through this before, and we will come back stronger than ever before.”

  Lane’s spontaneous pep talk seemed as much for himself as for his hometown, and while he fought to maintain his composure, his voice began to waver a bit. “Again, it’s a place that I call home,” he said. “The tornado passed, it looks like, just one street north of my house, so you can certainly imagine the emotions I am running through right now.” Lane gave one last warning for the storm as it continued east before going back off camera to try his wife again. The studio was dead silent.

  • • •

  At Plaza Towers the atmosphere became more chaotic by the minute. There was mass confusion about who had been evacuated and where they had gone. Because of how quickly the tornado had risen up and how frantically parents had been trying to check out their kids, there was no official record of how many students had been left and who they were. The teachers knew, but only in their heads, and they were scattered all over the property. Amy Simpson was going over her own mental checklist of whom she had seen and whom she hadn’t. She knew her prekindergartners and kindergartners were out of the building. She’d personally led them and many of the first graders to safety, including three boys who had been pinned underneath Karen Marinelli, who had been badly injured when a wall collapsed on top of her. Like Linda Patterson and other teachers at the school, Marinelli had borne the brunt of debris that very likely would have killed her students. Now she lay on a backboard in the parking lot waiting to be transported to the hospital. Her pelvis appeared to be broken. Simpson prayed she was going to be okay.

  On the other side of the building she had seen the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders—including Janice Brim and her students, who had been rescued from the tiny printer closet where they had taken shelter. There were some cuts a
nd bruises, but again all of the kids appeared to be okay. And just minutes earlier many of her second graders had been rescued one by one from the demolished back building—handed down the pile of debris as parents loudly cheered, grateful to see their kids alive.

  The only students Simpson had yet to see were the third graders. She could not say for sure how many kids were left because she’d been unable to make it to the back building before the storm had hit. In her heart she knew she’d made the right decision to race back to her office to be close to the intercom when the tornado hit, enabling her to issue that final warning to all of her staff and students. But she couldn’t help but feel pain and regret. If only she’d seen them, she’d know exactly who was missing. She knew all of her students. She loved them as her own, and she felt a deep pain within, thinking that somewhere, deep inside that pile of rubble, they were scared and injured or worse.

  The scent of natural gas began to perfume the air, and Simpson began to worry that there was going to be an explosion. She directed her teachers to walk their remaining students down the block to Abundant Life Church. But there were several miscommunications among police, parents, and other Moore Public Schools officials, who sent frantic family members to another church to look for their kids—causing even more chaos and heartache.

  Dark and confusing rumors had begun to circulate about the fate of the kids at Briarwood and Plaza Towers. Some television stations and social media began repeating unverified reports that kids had been evacuated from the schools on buses ahead of the storm—which wasn’t true. The entire Moore school system had been on lockdown. Another station reported an unconfirmed rumor that kids at one of the schools were trapped in a storm cellar that was quickly filling with water—also untrue, since neither school even had a storm shelter. Others began offering numbers of students who had been killed or were missing. No one was available to refute the reports and they began to circulate widely. Phone lines were down and administration officials were largely unreachable—and most had no idea what was happening on the ground. The entire city was in chaos.

  At Plaza Towers the reported number of missing children began to escalate. It went from twenty to thirty kids to as many as seventy-five unaccounted for. Nobody seemed to know where the numbers had come from, though Simpson believed that rescuers might have been double counting estimates provided by Eischen, Calvert, and the other teachers who had been evacuated from the back building. She couldn’t say for sure because there was no official count of who had been in the school at the time the tornado hit. It was all a frustrating guessing game. Her only reliable measure at that point was the number of anguished parents who stood around what remained of her school, waiting and hoping for their kids to emerge. Some had tried to climb into the rubble and had started to dig themselves, but police and firefighters had kept them back. No one knew what they were going to find.

  By then several dozen police and firefighters from all over the region, including some who were technically off duty, had converged on Plaza Towers and the surrounding neighborhood. There weren’t enough backboards to go around, so they began grabbing broken doors and flat pieces of lumber to carry the injured away from the school and nearby houses, where people were frantically looking for survivors. Up and down the block police used spray paint to mark houses. Some were simply marked with an X—symbolizing that they had been searched. Others included a number—when someone had been found dead. Many bodies had been found, but there was no way yet to recover them. Ambulances could barely make it through the streets.

  Down in the pit of the school’s back building, Lindy Simpson and several other men were beginning to pick apart the pile of debris that had buried Doan and her third-grade students. The men were tearing at it from two sides—with a group on the north and another on the south. Seeing the looks of pain and fear on parents’ faces, Simpson wanted to do everything she could to help them find their kids, and she positioned herself so that she could physically see who was coming out of the debris so as to quickly help families reunite with their children. All she wanted was for this horrible nightmare to be over. She hoped for more miracles like those she’d seen, when kids had emerged from beneath walls and cars injured but alive, but from the look of concern on her husband’s face, she began to fear for the worst.

  • • •

  Shortly before 4:00 P.M. Damon Lane finally got a text message from his wife. Melissa was okay. Their fence had been blown down, and there was minor damage to their house, but it was still standing. The radar had been right. One street to the north, houses had been blown away. “It looks like a war zone,” she told him. Back on air, Lane was noticeably less anxious than he had been only a few minutes before, but as reports rolled in about possible fatalities and widespread damage in Moore, he felt anguish for his city. “We would love it if we did not have to ever have to go through things like this. This is horrible,” Lane declared. “I tell you what: Even as a meteorologist, I wish that we could control the weather.” But nobody could do that, not even Gary England.

  • • •

  Deep in the rubble, Jennifer Doan sensed movement in the darkness above her. She called out for help, trying to project her voice despite the pressure on her chest, which made it hard for her to breathe. Finally someone responded. “We’re here,” she heard a man say. She hoped she wasn’t dreaming. “Porter,” she called out to the student next to her. “Hang on. Hang on. They are here for us.” The boy didn’t respond, and for a moment Doan worried it was too late. But as the debris began to shift, she felt him move. He was still alive. She had no idea how much time had passed. It felt as if they had been buried forever. She had started to believe they might not make it, but now there was hope not only for her but also for her students. There had to be a chance they were still alive. Around her Doan felt the pile shifting. The pressure was getting lighter. Suddenly, next to her, she felt workers lift Porter out of the hole. She heard him whimper. He was alive. A few seconds later the rocks around her head began to shift. A tiny ray of sunshine suddenly pierced the darkness, and then there was an opening. Doan used all the strength she had to thrust her hand through it, and someone grabbed it tight. “We’re going to get you out,” a voice told her. Doan was overwhelmed with emotion. “We’re right here,” she said again and again. “We’re all right here.”

  • • •

  At the edge of the pile Amy Simpson stood anxiously watching as rescue workers lifted Porter Trammell out and passed him down the long line of helpers. His blond hair was wet, and he was covered in scratches, but he was alive. She’d seen a few more kids before him carved out of the rubble, looks of fear on their tiny faces. They were banged up, but most looked as though they would recover. And every time a new child emerged, everyone on the scene erupted in cheers, trying to keep spirits up. Suddenly Simpson saw Doan lifted up. She was braced on each side by rescue workers, who gently carried her out of the debris. She couldn’t walk, and her left hand was pierced by a giant piece of rebar. They carried her to the parking lot and laid her on a backboard, where Simpson and her colleagues ran up and began to comfort her. Someone called her fiancé, Nyle, but they couldn’t reach him. Cell service was still out.

  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 m
inutes 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.