Jail employee among those killed in demolished Kentucky candle factory

A Kentucky jail employee was among those killed when a candle factory collapsed during Friday night’s tornadoes, the jail announced, as reports emerged of inmates helping rescue workers from the devastation.

A spokesman for the Graves County Jail told The Washington Post that seven inmates were at the factory as part of a work program designed to help them get “a fresh start on life” after jail.

The inmates and their supervisor were reportedly buried alongside other workers when the tornado struck, causing the metal building to buckle and collapse on top of them.

“It has been a terrible night,” Graves County jail officials said in a Facebook post Saturday morning. “We completely evacuated the main jail. All the inmates that were housed in the main jail are safely tucked away in other county jails. … However we did have a few inmates working at the candle factory. We also lost 1 of our staff members.”

The jail declined to release more details, for the sake of the person’s family, adding: “We could use your prayers, we will pull through this as only Graves County could.”

Several inmates were treated for minor injuries before being transferred to a jail in another county, a spokesperson said late Saturday night in response to questions from The Post.

Lathan Harpole, 18, was at the factory when the tornado hit.

Buried beneath the rubble, he and another man started digging upward, he told Kentucky radio station WFPL. They emerged about 15 minutes later with only scrapes and bruises, he said. Others were not so lucky.

“I helped one of the inmates out and he told me that the officer was stuck bad,” Harpole wrote in a Facebook comment in response to the prison’s post.

Harpole told WFPL he had been employed at the factory for only a few weeks, making an extra dollar over the hourly minimum wage for working the night shift, which ran from 5 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.

Around midnight Friday, the tornado sirens sounded, and workers took shelter in the bathrooms, he said. A short time later, the tornado struck.

“I heard what sounded like rolling thunder and I started running. And I looked back, the roof lifted up and came back down,” he told WFPL. “I remember screaming out, ‘Scream if you need help,’ and all you could hear was people screaming from every direction.” Another worker, Kyanna Parsons-Perez, told NBC’s “Today” show of the prisoners’ plucky efforts to rescue people from the rubble.

“Some of those prisoners were working their tails off to get us out,” said Parsons-Perez, who earlier live-streamed the cries of her colleagues awaiting rescue. “And to see inmates — because you know they could have used that moment to try to run away or anything — they did not. They were there, they were helping us.”