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 person who found Amy’s baby was ______.