A．in the mud at the base of a treeB．high in the branche……
TEXT A
A deputy sheriff’s dash
mounted camera captures his tornado chase. Racing just minutes behind the
monster storm he looks for damage and victims.
Dep. Robert
Jolley, "It was big and ugly."
He is stopped, briefly, by a
fallen power line.
Dep. Robert Jolley, "We had to keep stopping,
moving debris, out of the roadway, things like that."
At about
this time, he sees the tornado begin tearing through the rural community of
Bridge Creek.
Beneath the storm, Robert Williams and his family
climb into a closet and brace themselves for the very worst minutes of their
lives.
Robert Williams tells his family’s story, "We set
down and grabbed the door, and shut it, and held on to it as tight as I could.
It snatched the roof off, and pulled the mattress up, and pulled all the kids
up. I saw them go up; at the same time the walls fell; my wife was holding on to
me, fell over and sliding with the house. The trailer I guess blew up on this
thing, and slid over the top of us, and then it pushed us over that there,
somewheres. It killed my wife and had me trapped on the back of the
house."
Williams’ wife died in his arms.
Robert
Williams, "She couldn’t say nothing. I just held her head in my hands, cause
that’s all I could get up, and tears rolled down her face, and she died, and
that was it. Tough, tough, tough. Tough time for everybody. "
His daughter, Amy Crago, her husband, Ben Molton, and their ten month old
baby girl, Aleah, vanished.
Amy Crago says, "We were all
together, and we all rolled a little bit together, and then we just all went
different directions. I don’t know what happened to my baby during it all, but I
didn’t pass out through the whole thing, I remember it very well, and I was in
the air, and all the debris was hitting me and you can’t imagine how bad that
hurt."
The tornado tossed Amy Crago and her baby hundreds of
feet in different directions. She says, "I went to one house and I reached in
one window and got a shirt and put it on my head, cause it was bleeding, and I
finally found a lady and she took me down to where the police were and the
police, I was just trying to get my baby, I thought my whole family were
dead."
"I just knew everybody was dead and I was all alone. I
was so happy when they found her. It’s just a miracle. There’s
surely nothing else you can say about it... "
Amy Crago
—
Eventually Amy got a ride to a hospital. That’s about the time
deputy Robert Jolley arrived and saw Amy’s father. He says, "I saw one man
walking in the road way say he lost his daughter and granddaughter, so this is
where I immediately started looking."
At the scene of the
tornado he describes what happened when he went looking for the baby, "We got
down here to where all this debris is up against the trees. Something
caught the corner of my eye. I looked and I couldn’t see anything. And
when I looked again, I could see there was a baby, curled around the base of the
tree, down there, had her little face in the mud."
Deputy
Jolley’s dash mounted camera captures the rest. "She actually looked like
a rag doll. She was dirty. Her ears were packed with mud, her eyes were packed
with mud. When the baby started crying, I felt great, felt wonderful. I kept the
baby with me for about 45 minutes, before I could find EMS, and I turned her
over to them."
Baby Aleah was reunited with her mother in a
hospital. Now they are staying in a motel with her dad. She says, "I just knew
everybody was dead and I was all alone. I was so happy when they found her. It’s
just a miracle. There’s surely nothing else you can say about it."
Amy lost her mother; her husband is in critical condition, but alive. And
except for a few bruises baby Aleah is doing just fine.
The baby was found ______.
A．in the mud at the base of a tree
B．high in the branches of a tree
C．in the closet of a ruined house
D．in a bush on a mountain slope
