The parents of an 11-year-old girl held her tightly after learning she survived the EF-5 tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., on Monday. The tornado leveled an area 12 miles long. In its path was Plaza Towers Elementary where 11-year-old Zoe Tennyson was in class.
“Me and Myra were just going, ‘Please protect us, please protect us,'” Zoe said. She described being huddled with classmates, using her arms to cover her head during the tornado.
“I was in the corner and debris kept slipping in the side and every time I breathed, I breathed in debris,” she told KFOR-TV’s Courtney Francisco.
After the tornado tore apart the town of 56,000, parents raced to the school to check on their children.
“We thought we lost them,” Zoe’s father, Brett Tennyson, said. We he arrived at the school, the building was no longer there. Instead, a pile of mangled debris greeted him. “I was running around screaming, looking for my baby.”
He found her, but other parents weren’t as fortunate.
“A lot of screaming kids, a lot of crying kids, a lot of — a lot of broken hearts,” he said.
While grateful to have her daughter, Zoe’s mother, Lisa Tennyson, said she’s heart broken and mourns the loss of her daughter’s schoolmates.
“My heart goes out to all the parents who didn’t get their children out,” Lisa said. “It’s devastating.”
Twenty-four people died in Monday’s tornado, seven of those were children at Plaza Towers Elementary school. The first student to be identified was nine-year-old Ja’nae Hornsby. According to KFOR-TV, her father searched all night for her, but later learned she was among the seven killed at Plaza Towers Elementary.
Damages from the deadly twister have been estimated to be more than a billion dollars.
