Tricia Gilles smiles as she chats with sons,
Caleb, 11, and Collin, 10. Mrs. Gilles has been surrounded by her family at
Southern Indiana Rehab Hospital during her recuperation from injuries sustained
in the March 2 tornado that destroyed their Henryville, Indiana home.
Tricia Gilles was on the job at Best Buy and not paying much
attention to the weather March 2 while her husband, Darrell, who works for
Kaiser Flooring in Henryville, Indiana, was listening to the storm chasers on
Twitter. By late afternoon, Darrell was getting nervous about the weather and
texted Tricia to say there was going to be a bad storm. She left work to pick
up their three kids at school and he headed home about 3 p.m.
Relating their story from Tricia’s hospital room at Southern
Indiana Rehabilitation Hospital in New Albany, Darrell said, “We knew the storm
was coming. We got home and turned on the TV and I’m still not thinking
tornado.” But the couple prepared anyway, piling blankets and pillows in their
safe space.
“Our shelter is in a closet and we were packing it full of
pillows. I went outside and it was not raining but off in the distance I could
see a funnel cloud. I was hoping it would take a different path but it headed
right toward us,” he said.
Tricia got the children, Caleb, 11, Collin, 10, and Mia 8,
ready while Darrell watched out the window. Collin asked if he could put on his
baseball helmet. He had heard on the radio on the way home from school that
kids should put on their helmets if they had one.
“We tried not to freak them out,” Darrell said. “It (the
tornado) was about 1,500 feet away when I knew we were taking the hit.”
Joining his family in the closet, Darrell and Tricia held on
tight to the children as the house took to the air. “You lose your stomach,”
Darrell said. “I was mashing them (the kids) hard as I could and the house was
twisting and then landed with a loud boom.”
The family felt the blow. Dazed but awake and on his knees,
Darrell said it went from pitch black to bright and it took him a few minutes
to figure out where he was. The house had landed near a small lake that is
usually about 60 feet away. Nothing looked the same. His neighbor’s house was
half gone and their home lay in pieces around them.
“Tricia started yelling that her back hurt,” Darrel said. “I
couldn’t breath and couldn’t reach her. My teeth felt strange in my mouth. The
kids were all face down and not moving, nothing. Then Caleb started to move and
the kids started to pop up.”
Darrell told everyone not to move and to calm down. “I’m
thinking something’s got to be bad wrong with everybody. No one should walk
away from that,” he said. Realizing he had to do something, Darrell worked
through his pain to try to reach the neighbor’s house with the kids but he
didn’t make it before the hail started. Some people ran down the hill to help
as they all watched a second storm spinning. While the storm did not touch down
it brought hail the size of softballs. The good Samaritans, EMT Karen Miller
and her boyfriend, used a door from the house to cover Tricia with the man just
having room to stick his head under the door to avoid the beating. Darrell had
to use drywall to cover him and the children with Caleb getting “pretty beat
up” and suffering two damaged vertebrae. Once the hail stopped the good
Samaritans strapped Tricia to the door and put her in a pickup truck to get her
to the hospital using their jackets to cover her. Darrell, by now going into
shock from a broken sternum, 14 broken ribs, a dislocated collar bone, and
broken jaw, managed to get the rest of the family into the neighbor’s house
avoiding downed trees and electric lines along the way.
Mia had a severe concussion and once at the hospital had to
be placed in a coma to bring her out of seizures she was suffering. She also
had a lacerated liver. It was 10-year-old Collin--who had worn his baseball
helmet through the storm--that suffered only a few bruises from the hail.
The family was among the thousands of people who survived
the EF-4 tornado that took the lives of 38 people in Kentucky and Indiana that
day. As they recover from the tragedy, the Red Cross has been there to help
with their immediate emergency needs, providing food and clothing and offering
mental health counseling. But Tricia said, unlike some families, they are not
having nightmares.
“We have just this peace about it,” said Tricia who suffered
a shattered pelvis and has undergone two surgeries since the incident occurred.
“In the closet my prayer was for God to save my babies. He went above that, not
only answering that prayer, but he saved us, too. Our kids don’t have to go
through that devastation. There’s some reason we are here and there are people
out there, the Red Cross and others who want to help. We are so thankful for
the help from Red Cross and everyone. You hear all these horrible stories on
the news and now this; you realize there are still good people out there,
people who care.”
