As the tornado tore through the subdivision, it decimated some houses and damaged others, yet left some just next door unscathed. The people who’ve had to see it are reckoning with how close they and their own children came. A car from “Paw Patrol,” and bedding printed with the faces of its goofy animal first responders. And did that child live? Those thoughts, they overtake you, they overwhelm you.” “And you think, that’s associated with a child somewhere. “So you go about that task of trying to get this work done, and then you come across a wagon,” he said, standing near the Radio Flyer bent and broken on a pile. It can be horrific work, Ward said, but they try to steady themselves enough because they know it must be done. Now, they comb through what remains, turning over every strip of dry wall and each twisted car to make sure there aren’t more victims underneath.
They usually tell people to get in a bathtub and cover up with a mattress, he said, but that probably would've made little difference here: Some homes were destroyed so completely the tornado ripped all they way through the floor, exposing the earth below. “That’s hard to think about - you go to bed, and your entire family is gone the next day,” said Ronnie Ward, with the Bowling Green Police Department.
Two others from the neighborhood died of their injuries at the hospital. Their surviving relatives said it's too difficult to speak of it.Īnother family here lost six members: three adults, a 16-year-old girl, a 4-year-old boy and another child.Īround the corner, a 77-year-old grandmother was killed. From the two brothers' households, one woman died, along with two children and two infants, police said. They were happy and gregarious, holding summertime parties in the yard. Two brothers lived in homes next door to each other with their families, Ademi said. One of the families that lost many members was from Bosnia. “I turn my memory back to 22 years ago,” she said. Now she looks around her own neighborhood. “We come from war this reminds us, it touches the memory of that, where we’ve been and how we came here,” said Ganimete Ademi, a 46-year-old grandmother who fled Kosovo in 1999 during the war, in which she lost her uncle and a nephew. All around them, amid the ruins, is evidence of the kids they used to watch climb off the school bus. Neighbors who survived are so stricken with grief they struggle to speak of it. Entire families were lost, among them seven children, two of them infants. Fourteen people died in a few blocks, 11 of them on a single street, Moss Creek Avenue. When a tornado touched down in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in the middle of the night, its violence was centered on this friendly subdivision, where everyone waved at one another and giggling children spent afternoons tooling around on bicycles on the sidewalks. The walls of one house were gone, and the only thing left standing inside was a white Christmas tree. Clothes hung from the branches of snapped trees. Across the street, the tidy homes on this cul-de-sac were reduced to mounds of lumber. (AP) - The little red wagon was strewn upside down on a heap of rubble - a pile of boards and bricks, a mangled blue bicycle, a baby doll.īehind it, there was little more than a hole in the ground where a house had stood.