Girl killed in hurricane had ‘beautiful heart’

Georgia family remembers 11-year-old who gave them joy

DONALSONVILLE, Ga. – Eugene Radney held his 11-year-old granddaughter Sarah Radney in his arms moments after Hurricane Michael's powerful winds catapulted a concreteembedded post through the roof striking her head. “When I picked her up, I knew she was gone,” he said, still reeling a week later. He rubbed his eyes and coughed, trying to block tears. “She was so limp.” He remembers the time – 4:21 p.m. Wednesday. The post was holding up the carport in his backyard at least 50 feet away. The rest of the lakefront, modular house was untouched, save for a blown-out window and the damaged corner of the carport. “It just seemed like God's timing,” Eugene said. Sarah sat down on the couch next to her grandmother seconds before the sudden force of the hurtling post burst through the ceiling like a bomb. Eugene was sitting across the room in his green recliner. Her grandmother Elizabeth, who sat a foot away from Sarah, suffered a collapsed lung and a bruised arm. It would take five hours for emergency medical services to arrive. Eugene held Sarah's little hand as wind and debris swirled around the living room. He laid her down, covered her with a purple-and-blue quilt, and called her dad, Roy Radney. Roy, staying three counties away in Thomasville with a cousin, called every few minutes to ask if she was breathing. “It was panic,” Roy said Thursday, staring into the distance. “You never think that anything like this is going to happen. “You always worry, but you always feel like you're going to be OK in the end. This time shows – it's not always like that. We always say, ‘That won't happen to us,' but it really can. It can happen.” Sarah and her brother Gavin, 12, were spending fall break at their grandparents' place about 60 miles northwest of Tallahassee and at least 100 miles from the coast. Hours before the winds arrived like a freight train, Eugene's glowing granddaughter said her last prayer at breakfast. They held hands, and she closed her eyes. “God, be with my daddy, my stepmama, my brother Gavin and my sisters,” she said, naming them all. She prayed for her grandparents and for her incarcerated mom. “Be with my mama. Let her get back on the right track and follow You.” As the historic hurricane plowed farther inland, Sarah gazed out the window with her brother in awe of the powerful rain and gusts of wind. She sang “Amazing Grace.” “She was a beautiful girl with a beautiful heart. She was one of a kind, and God took her home,” her father said. “It won't ever be the same without my baby.” Across from his destroyed barn in his now-crumbled woodworking shop, Eugene, 65, was saving a cedar wood hope chest he made for Sarah. He was going to give it to her for Christmas, along with an Easy Bake Oven. Sarah loved baking snowman Christmas cookies and pinkfrosted strawberry cake with her grandmother. Burly and white-bearded, Eugene dresses as Santa each year. Sarah was excited to be his helper elf again. He looked at an old photo of Sarah as a small girl, wearing a backward pink baseball cap, her face scrunched up funny. “That's the kind of spunky girl she is,” he said. Roy's favorite memory of Sarah is an early morning car ride when she was 5. She broke the silence, asking him out of the blue, “Daddy, you know, I dream of pigs all the time?” So he got her one. Piglets were her favorite animal. Roy plans to carve one into her gravestone at the Pine Hill Baptist Church cemetery in Cairo, Georgia, where she was buried Monday. “The things that aggravated me the most – her messy room and shoes in the middle of the floor and dirty clothes in the bathroom – oh, my God, I'm going to miss that so much,” Roy said, his voice low and tired. Last week, purple balloons were flown at her remembrance at her school, Cairo's Washington Middle, where she acted in plays and learned the trumpet in band class. On the way to the graveside funeral at Pine Hill, Roy and Amber, her stepmom, saw a doe cross the road. “That's Sarah,” their doe-eyed girl, they thought.

SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT Sarah Radney