Deep South tornado outbreak: 2 dead from twister in the dark

A twister roaring out of the darkness smashed through a small Alabama community early Wednesday during an outbreak of tornadoes across the Deep South, killing a 39-year-old woman and her 8-year-old son on a street where generations of one family lived.

One of dozens of tornadoes kicked up by a severe weather front that spent two days rolling from east Texas across several Southern states, the storm shocked people from their sleep in Flatwood, a sparsely populated community not far from the Alabama state capital of Montgomery.

In the early morning darkness, family members emerged from splintered homes to the sounds of screaming. Several homes in their community had been hit by falling trees, and a large pine tree crushed the bedroom of the mobile home where a father, mother and son were believed to be sleeping.

“The tree fell right slap in the middle of the bed while they were asleep. It fell on the wife and the kid,” family member Norman Bennett said of the victims.

The Montgomery County Sherriff’s Office said the victims were a 39-year-oldwoman and her 8-year-old son, but did not release their names. A man, who is the woman’s husband and boy’s father, was injured and taken to the hospital.

Bennett said the man was trapped under the tree and debris, and could not see what had happened to his wife and child. “He was hollering. ’Find my baby. Find my baby,” Bennett said.

For one couple in Flatwood, a split-second decision may have just saved them.

Caroline Bankston said she and Tim Wiseman were at home watching news reports about the weather and trying to figure out where the twister was when she looked out the dining room window and realized it was already on top of them. They ran to a safer corner as their roof caved in, burying their sofa under debris.

“We just prayed, prayed, prayed, ‘Please God Please take care of us. Please,’ and he did. You can replace stuff, but you can’t replace a person,” Bankston said, her voice still trembling. “We were just sitting there on the couch. Thank God we moved.”

The storm system fueled by record high temperatures spawned dozens of tornadoes on Tuesday and early Wednesday as it moved from east Texas through Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama and neighboring states.

Tornadoes damaged homes, destroyed a fire station and ripped the roof off an apartment complex in Mississippi. In Alabama, the same storm system also destroyed a community center and left a mess of toppled trees, downed power lines and debris.

A total of 73 tornado warnings and 120 severe thunderstorm warnings were issued from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning, said Matthew Elliott, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

Montgomery County Sherriff Derrick Cunningham said a community center in Flatwood, on the same road where the fatalities occurred, was destroyed, and that search and rescue teams were going door to door Wednesday to account for all residents.

“We’ve got mobile homes that were flipped. We’ve got mobiles homes that had trees fall across them. There is a lot of damage back there, a lot of power lines that are down,” Cunningham said.

The National Weather Service Office in Birmingham classified the Flatwood storm as an EF-2 tornado, with winds estimated at 115 mph.