From A Raging Tornado
Except for the dreary, overcast weather, last November 15 was an ordinary midweek morning in Montgomery, Alabama. Thirty-one children were doing their usual thing at the Learning Zone Day Care Center: The babies were napping, the toddlers were playing. The older kids, ages three to five, were at the indoor playground on the opposite side of the Fun Zone, the 60,000-square-foot entertainment complex that leased space to the child-care facility. On evenings and weekends, the Fun Zone was always packed. People came to roller-skate, ride bumper cars, climb the rock wall, play arcade games. That day, all was quiet but for the shouts of preschoolers bouncing in the ball pit and crawling through the junglegym maze in what workers called the soft play area.Liberty Duke, director of the Learning Zone, was busy doing paperwork when sirens went off at about 10 a.m. She didn’t panic. Severe weather alerts are frequent that time of year and usually signal a hard, drenching rain. Figuring the pots of mums in the entryway could use a good watering, she picked them up and took them outside.
Then the power went out. As Duke stood in the dark, she heard glass shatter. Gusts of wind blasted through the broken windows, sending ceiling tiles spinning through the air. She tried to open the door, but it barely budged. Peeking out a crack, she was shocked. The Fun Zone was gone. “All you could see was the sky,” she says.
Across the parking lot, Lewis Harrison had just pulled into Car Audio Plus. He needed a new front speaker in his Chevy Blazer. Looking up, he and his buddy Bill Marcum saw a car hurtle over the roof of the post office. All of a sudden, they were in the middle of a raging tornado.
Stereo installer JJ Justiss ran to grab some equipment that had blown out of the shop. Behind him he saw the Fun Zone collapse into a mountain of metal and smoke. Grabbing his cell phone, he called 911 and took off, running so fast his Birkenstocks fell off in the driving rain.
Harrison had been to the Fun Zone many times with his six-year-old twin girls. He knew all about the kids in the day-care center. Everyone in the area did. He and Marcum ran toward the wreckage. Workers from Worth Cleaners, a few doors away, were right behind them.
Carried to Safety
By the time they arrived, Liberty Duke had made her way through the debris. Her four-year-old son, Justice, was one of the kids trapped inside. The silence was terrifying, Duke recalls. “We couldn’t hear any crying. That was the scariest part.”She pointed the men toward what had been the soft play area. The 30-foot wall that had enclosed it was now a pile of cinder blocks. Justiss, a small, wiry man, squirmed through the tangled tunnels of the junglegym maze. “Hello!” he bellowed. “Anybody there?” He could hear gas hissing and power lines zapping overhead.
Harrison and Marcum tried another way in, climbing under and over fallen steel beams, looking for survivors. Fiberglass insulation burned their eyes, and concrete dust filled their lungs. Then, in the midst of it all, came a sound that seemed almost miraculous: children crying.
Pressing forward, the men picked through mounds of crushed cinder blocks. After three or four minutes of frantic digging, they uncovered the ball pit, which was encased in sturdy netting. There were the little ones, huddled together, barefoot and terrified, all screaming.
When the walls started to crumble, teachers Lekithia McQueen and Vonnmetria Hamilton had shielded the children with their own bodies. Strong winds blew McQueen’s legs straight up in the air, and something sharp ripped her hand open, but she’d held on. She knew if she let go, her students would be sucked into the storm.
Pulling out his pocketknife, Justiss cut through the netting. “They were these itty-bitty kids,” he says, “scared to death and wanting Mama. I would have been the same way.”
He and Harrison jumped into the pit and started handing kids up over the wreckage, to the outstretched arms of Bill Marcum and Liberty Duke. Behind them, the dry cleaner employees fanned out to form a human chain. One by one, they handed the traumatized boys and girls down the line, until all were safely inside the cleaners.
The first girl Harrison reached bore an uncanny resemblance to his daughter Megan, which increased his intensity. Duke was nearly overcome with relief at the sight of the children—including her son. “They were covered with dust. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
Inside, workers covered them with blankets that had been laundered for customers. Several people from New2u, a consignment boutique in the same shopping plaza, brought coats and sweaters for the kids, who were soaked from the rain and shivering.
Meanwhile, the men kept digging. When emergency vehicles arrived, all the children were safely accounted for. In the day-care center, everyone was unharmed as well.
“Total strangers saved the day,” says Duke, whose son was one of two kids requiring medical attention, with a gash on his head that took 14 stitches. “He was crying, saying his school was broken before he learned to read. I told him that thanks to people we’d never met, he would learn to read at another school.”