'My home is gone': Battered residents sift through rubble after violent tornado event
'My home is gone': Battered residents sift through rubble after violent tornado event
SELMER, Tenn. — Stacy Thompson pulled Polaroid pictures from the debris pile that was once her home. She sifted through the rubble, warped landscape of shrapnel and debris, and picked the pictures out of the clay mud.
The tornado − an EF-3 with 160 mph winds − had taken the house, which had been perched in downtown Selmer, a community of 4,500 people in West Tennessee's McNairy County. The house had belonged to her mother, Lola Weatherly, and was one of at least a dozen homes demolished by the storm.
As of Thursday morning, at least four people were confirmed dead across Tennessee, with some residents still missing. It was the second time in two years that a tornado devastated a tight-knit community in McNairy County, killing nine people.
Later Thursday afternoon, Thompson found her mother's pictures, one by one — children and grandchildren at play, posing at family events, smirking mischievously at the camera.
"We can lose some photos," Thompson said through tears. "I don't have to have a picture. At least she's here."
'Baby, my house is gone. My home is gone'
The debris pile hardly resembled what was once a home. But Weatherly was − by scant miracle − not there during the storm.
Thompson described her as a staunchly independent woman who "really did not want to go to her brother's house for the storm." Thompson was able to convince Weatherly to go.
"She likes living by herself, you know," Thompson said. "But I told her she could have been one of those that didn't make it."
Weatherly is a bustling regular presence in town. She was the previous owner of the town-favorite Rockabilly Cafe for nearly 12 years and now works for the local Retro Dawgs restaurant.
"Everybody knows my mama," Thompson said. "Everybody loves her."
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Thompson described the moment she heard the tornado hit her mother's neighborhood.
"I just called and called," she said. "I got a hold of her, and she was just screaming. Just screaming, 'Baby, my house is gone. My home is gone.'"
Thompson paused to compose herself. "I said, 'Mama, we can replace that stuff. But I cannot replace you.'"
At that moment, a volunteer worker came over with a pink, water-logged Bible. "That's Mama's!" Thompson said, flipping through the sticking, but intact, pages. "I gave this to her for Mother's Day."
The front page of the Bible contained a single sentence scrawled in Lola's handwriting: "My children are my life!"
'It threw me up in it. I went flying'
Further down the hill, Hosea Cabrera stood clutching his side and surveying the muddy streak of land that was once the trailer he shared with his girlfriend, Jesse Furman. Cabrera said he lived in the area for about eight years after moving from California.
The storm, Cabrera said, was the "worst he's ever seen."
"It woke me up, and then it hit the trailer," he explained. "It threw me up in it. I went flying. Then it slammed me into the ground."
Furman said she was trying to hold onto Cabrera when the tornado struck the trailer with "one hand on the bed frame, and another on his ankle" before it flung him away.
Cabrera said he flew about 50 feet in the air before plummeting to the ground. "It just whistled," he added. "It was so loud."
The two found each other in the dark, barefoot, and surrounded by destruction.
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"Within minutes, the whole trailer just came apart," Furman said. "I woke up on the ground, covered in a wet blanket."
Cabrera had blood splattered across his shirt among the mud stains. He lifted his shirt to reveal a row of staples across his abdomen, which he got at the hospital.
He said the injury hurts, but that exhaustion is what bothers him.
"I can't sleep," he admitted. "I've only had 20 minutes of sleep today. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the tornado."
Still, Cabrera said they were the lucky ones.
"It could've been a lot worse," he noted, glancing toward the wreckage of an imploded trailer nearby.
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