6 Months Later, Central Florida Tornado Victims Struggle To Untangle Lives

By GRETCHEN PARKER The Tampa Tribune

Published: Aug 5, 2007

EAST LAKE COUNTY - At first, the hurting went away for Lee Hicks.

Three of his ribs cracked when the Groundhog Day tornado sucked him and his mobile home up from the edge of Ocala National Forest and dropped them 50 yards away into the thick, wild Florida brush. A slice of siding, twisted around a gnawed-off pine tree two stories up, marks the spot.

His home disintegrated around him as he and his longtime girlfriend, Tammy Alford, flew through the air. When he dropped to the ground, his thick, ex-Marine arms were still locked around her two children. She was facedown, pinned to the ground. Her mouth was full of dirt.

Hicks remembers pulling tree limbs and parts of the trailer off her as blood seeped from the back of her head. At the hospital, five staples mended her.

And his ribs healed. But now it feels like that funnel, when it tossed him around, jumbled up all the thoughts in his head, too. He feels worse now, he says, than when he got home from Vietnam.

Hicks calls it a case of the shakes. Except that it has lasted six months now. He's wondering whether they'll ever go away. His memory is shaky, too. Thoughts come into his head and then leave before he can get hold of them.

But one thought stays with him. It's the same puzzle his neighbors ruminate over daily.

Why did I live, when eight of my neighbors died? There has to be a reason. They don't dare think it was random.

They keep coming back to one comforting salve, a thought they turn over and over in their minds.

They think they've been as close to God as any live soul can get. He held them in his hand.

And then, he set them back down.

Private Property

Cooter Pond Road lies near the part of St. Johns River that is so lazy and still that lily pads float on top. In the evening, kids catch mullet on rods with no reels while their dads strip off their shirts and rest their work boots on the concrete embankment.

Traffic rumbles over the river, but only a few drivers make the turns to get to Cooter Pond Road. The dusty, rutted path is not a place strangers get to by accident. The only marker, halfway down the 2-mile stretch, is a country sign made of wood and nailed high on a utility pole.

It was perfect the way it was, say the people who live here. They bought land or rented mobile homes here to be on their own, to have a place to themselves that they could afford. They set their trailers back from the road, built a fence if they could afford it and locked the gate. They posted "No Trespassing" signs.

The early-morning tornado on Feb. 2, a Friday, was the ultimate intruder. Eight people died on this road, minutes after the same EF-3 funnel killed five people in a nearby neighborhood.

The tornado was one of a series that bore through Sumter, Lake and Volusia counties over a 70-mile stretch for more than an hour. In all, 21 people died. All lived in mobile homes.

On Cooter Pond Road, the damage was a catastrophe contained in a half-mile stretch. Most of those who survived the carnage got enough money from the government and nearby churches for new or used mobile homes.

But when the tornado twisted up their lives, it took their peace and quiet, too.

Even though most people got the help they needed, they can't help feeling like they've been laid bare, unguarded.

Even the trees are gone.

The tall pines that shielded the properties were each wrestled to the ground like an arm that lost the match and got pinned to the tabletop. Others were pulled up by the roots or chewed off 10 feet from the ground.

The lots suddenly seemed close together. Neighbors were eye to eye. A half-dozen families realized, with their mobile homes blown away, they had no place to hide.

Before the tornado, they knew each other by either first or last names. Their children rode four-wheelers together, and if they met up at the little store nearby, they would talk about the weather and say they were doing fine. They were in the habit of always waving and would pull over politely to give up the right of way on the road's narrow passage.

Some were closer and called themselves friends.

After the tornado, the casual friendships turned into lifelines, as they found they truly depended on each other for help digging out, finding their horses and pigs, or hauling dead trees and crumpled cars.

Even those who barely knew each other were suddenly thrown together, as if the tornado had mixed all of their lives together in a blender. Six months later, they still find clothes, tools and scraps of paper half-buried in their yards. Finding something and realizing it's not theirs is as unsettling as knowing their own stuff is scattered in places invisible to them.

Hicks spent weeks combing the woods, collecting his household's innards.

"Every time I go into the woods, I find some little portion of our lives," Hicks says. He uses a metal detector to find pounds of coins buried in the sandy soil. It's all from the 5-gallon jugs of change he kept in the trailer.

Hicks calls it the world's biggest game of hide-and-seek. "God's hid it, and we have to seek it," he says, his chest rumbling in a warm chuckle.

A Shared Fear

It's an odd thing to have in common with your neighbors - a bond forged by getting so close to death.

And they say it goes beyond their new personal connections. They've formed a true community that lives and breathes on its own. They started to realize it, several say, about a month after the tornado, when something happened that revealed the strength of their bond.

A brush fire broke out nearby on vacant land. Within minutes, at least a dozen neighbors - some say as many as 20 - rushed to their tractors and shovels. They threw clouds of dirt onto the flames, keeping it under control until firefighters arrived.

They're more likely to ask each other for help, Hicks says. "That was just unthinkable before. You would have just made do."

They have something else in common, too. Several say they are spooked by storms in a visceral way that they can't seem to get over.

The land is flat here, but with so many trees freshly scooped out, it almost feels like standing at the bottom of a bowl. It makes the summer storms all the more terrifying, as neighbors watch dark thunderclouds roll across the distant tree line that encircles them.

A recent bad nighttime thunderstorm was the talk of the road the day after. They described the lightning in detail, how they ran for cover and watched the bolts dance around them and worried that another tornado would come.

They say they share the kind of deep-down fear that you can fathom only if you've been at home, safe - and then, suddenly, not safe at all.

Hiley Akin, a mother of four boys who bought a used mobile home after hers was destroyed, found her quiet 16-year-old, Richard, pacing during the recent storm. In all of the months since the tornado, he had said nothing about it.

"He told me it still bothers him a little. I guess he didn't want me to worry."

He has his mother's straight, thick hair, and a baseball cap keeps it flattened down. He checks on dinner and makes tea without being asked. He lost his best friend, 15-year-old David Downing, to the tornado.

Richard's little brother, 8-year-old Tommy, lost his own best friend. Jacob Nolan, 7, lived next door and died alongside his father, Billy Nolan.

The link between neighbors is so tight at times that it's uncomfortable, a few say.

Jacob's mother offered what she could salvage of the little boy's clothes to Tommy. She didn't want them to go to waste, she said. Akin had to tell her no. There was something eerie, she said, about Tommy wearing his dead friend's shirts and jeans.

Tommy's the one his mother has the hardest time convincing that he's safe. When it thunders, he thinks the storm is going to take the house away, she says.

"He's real bad with it," she says. "He just starts crying. He don't know what to do with himself. He don't want to be alone."

The night of the tornado, Akin yelled for the boys as the funnel started whipping against the side of the trailer. Tommy didn't come. One of his bedroom walls had collapsed, and he was trapped underneath. Seven months pregnant, she struggled until she pulled him out, then fell on top of him to protect him.

The roof peeled off and the other walls went by her as Tommy screamed, over and over.

Cody was born two months later. Everybody on the road talks about him. They can't help smiling.

"Have you seen the baby? Isn't he great?"

Haunted

The weeds are thriving on Cooter Pond Road. New vines are covering up the stumps of the amputated pines.

Long, feathery grass grows high on the lots where homes used to be.

It threads the cinder blocks and a white cross made of pipe that mark where the Downings lived and died. Three of them were killed - David, who was a triplet, and his parents, Carla and Donald.

Next door, a new, donated mobile home sits where the Nolans' old trailer used to be. The father and youngest son died there, but the mother and her 11-year-old son survived.

Across the road, weeds are taking over the bundles of silk flowers that mark where the Baysingers made their home. All three of them - a grandmother, her daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter, died when their trailer was blown away. Someone taped a Christmas photo of them to the electric meter.

It's as much a graveyard as a neighborhood.

"Three died here, and three died across the street, and two died next door," says Alford, Hicks' girlfriend. She wiped at the tears that always fall when she thinks about what has happened. "I get the chills when I come down the street and hit the dirt road here."

The emptiness makes it hard for neighbors to forget about the night they call "the storm."

Especially for Hicks, who returns home from his job installing swimming pools every day to the same scene - the donated camper and RV that he, Alford and her children have been living in since their trailer was destroyed. Here, too, sun shines on young, vigorous weeds that are taking over two old Volvos and a tent and shed that store some of his stuff.

The rest of what he could salvage is piled under tarps. Three rust-colored pit bulls guard it.

Hicks is trapped in a limbo more hellish than anything his neighbors are facing. He's locked in a fight with the owner of his lot. Hicks says he was making mortgage payments to him before the storm. The owner, Marshall Gaard, says Hicks was merely renting.

The contract lies somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean, Hicks says, blown to bits by the tornado.

Besides losing the investment he says he has been paying on since 2001, the battle is tying up the federal money Hicks has applied for. If it weren't for the donated campers, he would be homeless.

Now, the landowner is trying to evict him.

"I'm just not able to move forward," says Hicks, who has been told by a Veterans Administration counselor that the storm triggered post-traumatic stress disorder because it was an event that was so completely out of his control.

The counselor gave him medication to help control the shakes, so he could manage his job of smoothing pool bottoms with a trowel.

Alford is so grateful for what Hicks did - holding tight to her 12- and 13-year-old kids as they were sucked through the air - that she has trouble putting it into words. She hates how the stress of it is affecting him.

"He just felt he didn't do his job," that he didn't help more people, she says, looking at him with wide, teary eyes as they sat across from each other, knee-to-knee, in the camper.

She whispers to keep from crying. "But he did."

Her daughter Roxanne is smart, and they have trouble convincing her that more tornadoes won't hit here. They tell her the odds are one in a million. She wants to believe it, but she's skeptical.

Don't Dwell On It

Akin didn't pay much attention to all of the promises. For weeks after the storm, businesses and churches blew through with pledges to give money and donate new trailers. There was even talk of the neighbors getting real houses.

Much of it never materialized, although enough donations were raised to replace several of the mobile homes that were demolished.

Akin got $5,000 when the local elementary school held a fundraiser, and she got $28,200 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She used the money to buy a 10-year-old, doublewide mobile home for her, her fiance and the three sons she has living at home. Volunteers helped her fix it up.

She was in a hurry, she says. "You're basically homeless. You're standing there, and everything you had was gone," she says, describing what she saw after the storm.

At dawn, the only thing standing was the grandfather clock she kept in her living room.

Her boys didn't want to move into another mobile home at first, Akin says. They worried it, too, would blow away.

She reasoned with them: "You've just got to go on with yourself - and be strong about it." And then she tried to do the same.

Getting to work was the best thing, and it still is, she says. While they make a new home, rebuild the fences that hold their horses and the pens that hold their pigs, they wait for everything else to heal.

Dustin Kennedy, her fiance, shares the same philosophy on how to get better: Don't dwell on it.

"I don't think too much about what I seen," Kennedy says. "I try not to, as much as possible."

After climbing out from under the walls of their mobile home that night, he ran through the driving rain, following the screaming.

He ended up seeing every one of his dead neighbors. He found the Nolans first, the boy lying alongside his dad. Then to the Downings, where he helped haul debris off the bodies of Carla and his good friend Donald.

And he was thinking of quiet, serious Richard as he helped carry his young friend David out of the rubble. David was white-faced, with a broken pelvis, and he died while Kennedy was loading him into the back seat of a sheriff's cruiser.

"I had his shoulders in my hands," Kennedy says.

When daylight came, he was still helping identify bodies.

Potted Roses

After the storm, Alford bought white rose bushes. They sit in plastic pots outside the camper.

She's waiting to find out whether they will keep their home before she sets the plants in the ground. They're covered with blooms.

She and Hicks won't consider moving voluntarily. They can't shake the feeling this is the land they were set down on.

"God wants me here. He left me here," Hicks says.

He says he'll never forget what it felt like when the funnel let him go. As it moved off into the woods, blazing with lightning, he had the sensation it was still pulling on him.

He gained just enough footing to stop himself.

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at gparker@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7562.