Tornado on Deadline
va pilot
A tornado hit Virginia, if you didn't hear. Check out some good stuff from the Pilot.
Kristin Davis: SUFFOLK
Jennifer Schmack is wearing her only pair of shoes. They are brown and lace up. Her husband found them on the front porch Monday, just after.
Richard Schmack has not shaved in three days, and he is in a golf shirt instead of his work uniform because it was the first thing he could fish out of the rubble.
A fat bee buzzes through the room, but nobody moves toward it.
Diane Tennant: Before the winds came, Delores Detwiler was comfortably at work.
As a cold front began to aggravate warm and humid air, Cheryl Mills got ready to run over to the vet's office to pick up her pet.
While thunderstorms roiled up, Elaine Hall and Sandy Peterson hooked up IV lines for cancer patients.
As a super cell crossed from North Carolina into Virginia, the Driver Furry Friends gathered six foster kittens and four cats at the Harmony House Antiques store for a photo shoot.
Around 4 p.m., the elements came together. Hell dropped out of the sky right on top of them.
Lon Wagner: SUFFOLK
The TV in the J&K Nail Salon was on but muted Monday afternoon, the stereo playing music, and no one noticed the tornado warnings.
Vickie Eason didn’t know Karen Weatherspoon, but she watched and smiled at her holding and playing with the salon owner’s 2-month-old baby, Sophia. Weatherspoon even phoned her significant other, William, and told him, “I’m holding a baby.”
Eason got up, paid and left a moment later. Weatherspoon didn’t.
Wednesday morning, the two women stood behind police tape and looked at where the salon had been in the strip mall, a building that has become an icon of a tornado that was incredibly destructive but killed no one. They saw insulation flapping in a breeze and sunshine glimmering off the shiny silver duct work dangling everywhere.
It had to be said, as both women did repeatedly, that if it weren’t for luck or fate or timing or being blessed, along with some human help, the two of them might never have met again.
