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    Showing posts with label Tornado. Show all posts

    Baby Angel Babcock's Grandmother Mourns Loss of Entire Family in Tornado

    The death toll from dozens of tornadoes that ravaged parts of the Midwest and South last week has reached 39 with the death of Baby Angel, the toddler found next to the bodies of her family members in a field near their Indiana home.

    She died Sunday from traumatic brain injury after her family removed her from life support.

    Fifteen-month-old Angel Babcock was taken by helicopter to Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, Ky., Saturday and placed in critical condition. Angel died at 4:10 p.m. Sunday afternoon after her grandmother, Kathy Babcock, made the decision with other family members to take her off life support.

    "I had my arm around her when she took her last breath," Babcock said in an exclusive interview with ABC News. "I sang to her itsy-bitsy spider."

    Angel's mother, Moriah Babcock, 20, father Joseph Babcock, 21, and two siblings Jayden and Kendall were found dead in the same field as the toddler Friday afternoon. Angel's grandmother told ABC News that when she let her granddaughter go Sunday afternoon, she knew the baby girl was going in the arms of her father.

    "We were all around the bed, I had my hand on the side of her, and I reached for her hand, and was holding her hand," Babcock said. "I don't know what made me let go but she put her arms straight up, she was daddy's little girl. So daddy picked her up and took her. The whole room seen that. He was just like, standing in front of her. She wanted to go with daddy."

    Now the family and friends of the Babcocks are faced with the task of burying five of their loved ones.

    "They need to have a proper burial," family friend Sherry Young said. "That's my dream, that's my prayer. I've been praying and praying that this can happen for them."

    The Babcock family has turned to their community for help in burying their loved ones. Bank of America has set up a Babcock Family Fund to help pay for the family's funeral expenses.

    "I know it's tragic we lost all five of them and it's hard that we did," Young said. "The one thing I can say, they're all together and that is comforting. Knowing they are together because they were together day in and day out and they'll always be together."

    Indiana Tornado Outbreak 2012: More Than 30 People Killed As Violent Storms Hit Indiana, Kentucky

    Across the South and Midwest, survivors emerged Saturday to find blue sky and splinters where homes once stood, cars flung into buildings and communications crippled after dozens of tornadoes chainsawed through a region of millions, leveling small towns along the way.
    At least 38 people were killed in five states, but a 2-year-old girl was somehow found alive and alone in a field near her Indiana home. Her family did not survive. A couple that fled their home for the safety of a restaurant basement made it, even after the storms threw a school bus into their makeshift shelter.
    Saturday was a day filled with such stories, told as emergency officials trudged with search dogs past knocked-down cellphone towers and ruined homes looking for survivors in rural Kentucky and Indiana, marking searched roads and homes with orange paint. President Barack Obama offered federal assistance, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich declared an emergency Saturday.
    The worst damage appeared centered in the small towns of southern Indiana and eastern Kentucky's Appalachian foothills. No building was untouched and few were recognizable in West Liberty, Ky., about 90 miles from Lexington, where two white police cruisers were picked up and tossed into City Hall.
    "We stood in the parking lot and watched it coming," said David Ison, who raced into a bank vault with nine others to seek safety. "By the time it hit, it was like a whiteout."
    In East Bernstadt, two hours to the southwest, Carol Rhodes clutched four VHS tapes she'd found in debris of her former home as she sobbed under a bright sun Saturday.
    "It was like whoo, that was it," said Rhodes, 63, who took refuge with four family members in a basement bedroom that she had just refinished for a grandchild.
    "Honey, I felt the wind and I said, `Oh my God,' and then it (the house) was gone. I looked up and I could see the sky."
    The spate of storms was the second in little more than 48 hours, after an earlier round killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, and the latest in a string of severe-weather episodes that have ravaged the American heartland in the past year.
    Friday's violent storms touched down in at least a dozen states from Georgia to Illinois, killing 19 people in Kentucky, 14 in Indiana, three in Ohio, and one each in Alabama and Georgia.

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