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LITTLE BOY FOUND
Castalian Springs, Tennessee—Two hours after the tornadoes tore through town, firefighter David Harmon, 31, and his partner, Karl Wegner, made one last pass through a field in which a young woman had already been found dead. It was pitch-dark as the two trudged through the mud, waving their flashlights. Every so often, one would call out to the other when he spotted something.
"I've got a baby stroller over here," Wegner shouted.
"And I've got a doll," Harmon called back. The doll was lying face-down, arms over its head and dressed in a green T-shirt and a loosened diaper.
Then it moved.
"It's not a doll!" Harmon called out again.
"As soon as we rolled him over, he gasped and started crying," Harmon says. Unsure of the extent of the baby's injuries, he carefully aligned his neck and spine and then cradled him in his arms. The baby stopped wailing almost immediately.
"Hang in there, big guy," Harmon urged. "Stay with me."
The baby, who they soon found out was 11-month-old Kyson Stowell, had lived nearby with his mother, Kerri, 23, a single parent. That evening, Kerri had called her parents, who lived nearby, and told them the TV had gone dark. "The storm is heading your way," Kay Stowell told her daughter, and then the line went silent.
"We knew something was wrong," Kerri's dad, Douglas, says. He and his wife navigated their car around fallen trees and other debris to get to Kerri's home. Once there, they found the house was gone, and a hundred yards away, emergency workers were huddling around something. It was the Stowells' grandson. At the sound of his grandparents' voices, he opened his eyes for the first time.
A worker then asked Douglas who else had been in the house, and it was soon determined that the victim in the field was Kerri.
At Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, a pediatric surgeon verified that Kyson's injuries were "relatively minor"—incredible given that the 25-pound child had been hurled the length of a football field by the force of the storm. "He's a miracle," says Douglas, who will raise the boy with his wife.
Kyson celebrated his first birthday ten days after he was found, and Harmon was invited. It was a party filled with emotion for the boy rescued and the daughter the Stowells lost. Harmon says he wants to stay in the boy's life somehow. "I'd love to get to know him," he says.
THE CAREGIVERS
Jackson, Tennessee—For six weeks last year, the senior nursing students at Union University had practiced their emergency medical skills at a local hospital. And just days before the tornado struck, they sat through a class on disaster triage. Still, they'd never faced anything like the devastation that visited their campus when the tornado hit that February evening.
Candace Cross, 21, Anika Schulte, 20, and 12 dormitory mates huddled in their bathrooms. "We were just praying," says Cross, who is from Lebanon, Tennessee. When the wind died down, the shaken students began to pick their way across the destroyed campus—approximately 40 percent of the dorms were wrecked—to the Penick Academic Complex.
On the way, Schulte, who is from Woodbury, Minnesota, spotted a young woman bleeding heavily from a gash on her leg. The student nurse's instincts and training kicked in, and she made sure the woman sat down, while Cross sprinted to the athletic office for an armful of first-aid kits.
The students created a makeshift triage station. Then Cross began to make her way down darkened hallways, searching for wounded people. She cleaned and dressed injuries. Glass had to be left alone, says Schulte, "because I didn't have enough light to get it out."
Help arrived shortly to care for the injured. But, as Schulte says, "for a while, we were the best they had."
HELPING HANDS
Highland, Arkansas—The lights went out at the Timberline Restaurant almost an hour before closing. Manager Billy Shelton, Jr., looked out the front door—and saw a tornado coming straight for him.
The retired Army sergeant quickly herded seven people, including his wife, Sharon, into the back room. Seconds later, the twister hit, taking the dining room's roof and two walls.
Shelton barely had time to register the damage when he saw a woman fleeing the remains of the house across the street. She said her elderly father, Stanley Gamble, was trapped, and she and her mother, Louise, could not free him.
Shelton and customer Patrick Loerzel climbed the pile of debris. "We'll never be able to lift this off him," Shelton remembers thinking. But the men surprised themselves by dragging the rubble off. Both husband and wife got away with just a few broken bones.
Back at the remains of the Timberline, Shelton's customers and staff were heading out into the night. "Call us," he said, "when you make it home."
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