Tornado Survivor's Tale Of Terror

Huddled in a downstairs closet with his elderly parents, Mark Ausbrooks looked up and saw the sky where the roof used to be. When he pushed back a tree limb and shoved open the door, he had a clear view of Interstate 40 in Mayflower because the back wall was gone, reports NBC

Ruination around him was so complete, the Ausbrooks, 50, could hardly believe they survived the tornadoes that killed 14 people in his Arkansas hometown, Mayflower, and neighboring Vilonia.

“We didn’t have a scratch on us,” the airline worker told NBC News after a long Sunday night, sifting through wreckage of the house in which his parents had lived since 1952.

“If you saw where we were in the house, there is no way we should have walked out of there.”

Ausbrooks was staying with his dad Bill, 82, and mom Virginia, 79, when the tornado warning sirens began blaring Sunday evening. He and his father had gone outside under the carport to get an idea of where the twisters were headed. His mother screamed, “Get in the house!”

“The sky turned the weirdest color of gray I’d ever seen,” Ausbrooks said. “You always hear how still it gets, and there was not a leaf moving.”

His sister at her hardware store across the street said a bolt of lightning came crashing down near it. Then they heard a crack in their backyard.  The two men headed inside to hear a TV announcer saying everyone in Mayflower should take cover. Then came “that roar that everyone talks about,” he said.

Ausbrook ran upstairs for a flashlight and a half-dozen pillows to protect their heads. By the time he returned to the den, the power was out. The family gathered close in a small closet once used for a washer and dryer.

Bill, who has difficulty moving around, sat on a hope chest. On the floor, his son wrapped one arm around his dad’s knees and the other around Virginia, who had a stroke last year.

“I was saying the Lord’s Prayer and my mother was saying over and over, ‘Please! Please! Lord save us!’” the son recalled, his voice cracking, NBC reported. ”At about that time you could hear stuff hitting the house and you heard a loud whoosh and my dad said, ‘There goes the roof.’

“All of a sudden, I felt rain and I looked up and I could see the sky. The roof of the whole house was completely gone.”

He took the picture (above) of what they saw. 

One huge tree had fallen into the den, missing the closet they were in by just feet, according to Ausbrook. The tree limbs were blocking the closet door, that he eventually forced open.

“I looked out and there’s a hole in the back wall and I could see the interstate. It looked like a kid playing with Hot Wheels, just cars everywhere and people running up and down,” he said.

The Ausbrookses couldn’t get out. People they called to were afraid the structure was too unstable to enter. They finally got through to 911 and three firefighters climbed in and rescued them. That’s when Ausbrooks got a better look at what had happened to his childhood home and the community where he grew up.

“Just utter destruction,” he said. “It looked like someone had walked around randomly snapping all the trees.”

An RV was in the ditch across from the house.

“We were like, ‘Where the heck did that come from?’” he said, before realizing the recreational vehicle had been carried from the dealership across the interstate. “There were RVs everywhere.” 

Relatives arrived to help. Bill and Virginia went to a daughter’s house, and Mark Ausbrooks and other family members worked through the night to recover what they could from the debris. They placed anything of value in the living room, covered it with a tarp, and grabbed as many photographs and other mementos as they could carry.

“Mark was particularly worried about his father’s rocking chair, that had “been in the family forever.”

They cut through some trees and found it, miraculously unscathed — just like him and his parents.