'They Didn't Have A Chance'

By GRETCHEN PARKER The Tampa Tribune

Published: Feb 4, 2007

PAISLEY - When Darman Baysinger woke up Saturday morning, he rolled over and looked at his wife. His eyes were rimmed red from crying, the circles around them dark.

"Please tell me," he said, "that it was all a bad dream."

Michelle Baysinger said the only thing she could think of: "Honey, I wish."

The day before had shown Darman, 29, a hell he didn't know existed.

Where his mother's mobile home had sat, on a lot just outside Ocala National Forest, there was a blank spot.

He looked toward the mashed-down acres of pine trees to the north, about 50 yards away. At first he didn't realize what he was looking at. It was his mother's home, shredded in the trees and strewn the length of a football field. The tornado Friday morning had pulverized it.

A Lake County sheriff's deputy walked up to ask who had lived on the property, and Darman went down the list: his mother, his sister and his niece. When he got to his niece, who was 8 years old, the deputy teared up.

He told Darman they had found his family. All three bodies had been pulled from the gnarled, splintered mess.

In all, eight people died on this unmarked dirt road, known as Cooter Pond Road, near tiny Lake Mack.

It's a small pocket of the carnage the storms made in Sumter, Lake, Volusia and Seminole counties, killing 20 people, between 3 and 4:30 a.m. Friday.

But what happened here tells the story of a beastly storm that clenched its fist around a neighborhood and didn't let go.

It looks like at least a dozen bombs went off, each on a separate property. On all but a couple of the lots along about a quarter-mile stretch, nothing is standing. Each lot is 2.5 acres wide, but the houses were blown to so many bits that the homes are blended together and overlap property lines.

With no structures standing, rescue workers marked the land they had inspected by spraying orange X's onto the nearest crunched-up cars and trucks.

The Nolans

The Nolans' mobile home, across the road from the Baysingers', was picked up and tossed 30 yards into palmetto brush. A family of four lived here, but only two survived.

Jacob Nolan, 7, and his dad, Bill, 38, died together. A neighbor found them lying under a blanket next to a crushed sofa in the pile that used to be their home. Bill's arms were around Jacob. They were facing each other.

The boy's mother, Becky Nolan, woke up seconds before the twister sucked them up. Bill had grabbed her by the hair and thrown her from the bed to protect her. He scrambled to find Jacob.

The last thing she heard was Bill yelling, "I got him!"

She was knocked unconscious as she flew. When she awoke, she was standing on the other side of their front yard, a hundred feet from where their home lay. The wind was still roaring, and the rain was pouring.

"I didn't know where I was," she said, crying as she told the story Saturday.

She struggled to keep herself together as she looked at the mess around her, a day after her life had been pulled apart. She cradled her left arm, hanging in a sling. Her cheeks and lip were cut, and she had a black eye.

"I have one son. I have one son," she repeated to herself, referring to the 11-year-old who also was home and survived the storm. "Edwin Burch, named after my father," she said, smiling through tears.

Denver McCally, 40, lives a few lots down. He had run from his place and over to the Nolans' in the dark and rain, in the minutes after the funnel finally left. He saw a paramedic shine a flashlight on Bill and Jacob.

"He just said they was DOA. DOA. No pulse. He said to just put the blanket back over them. There was no hope for them," McCally said.

McCally said he will try to forget the expression he saw on Bill's face as he clutched his youngest son. McCally is afraid it's the kind of thing that sticks in your mind forever.

"How much of it can you forget?" he asked.

The Downings

Cooter Pond Road is a place where people move because they can't afford to live anywhere else, several survivors said. Either that, or they want their privacy. Garbage trucks don't pick up back here; mailmen don't deliver back here.

Neighbors were on good terms, but they're not the kind who mind each other's business. When asked, they struggled to recall one another's names.

But when that hellish tornado twisted them up and spit them out, they did their best to help one another. Even in the chaos of the immediate aftermath, when the rain was coming down and it was pitch dark.

Next to the Nolans lived the Downings. There were five - 15-year-old triplets and their parents. Now only two of the teens are alive, Kayla and Heather. Kayla wasn't home when the storm hit.

Another neighbor, former Marine Robert Lee Hicks, cracked two ribs when the twister picked up his mobile home and slammed it to smithereens. No one at his house died, though, and he was well enough to help.

In the light of lightning strikes and headlights of the four-wheelers that raced through carrying rescue workers, he saw someone stumbling away from the Downings' home.

"I saw a guy I'd never seen before, and he was carrying a girl," Hicks said.

The man was struggling to keep hold of her, huffing and stumbling as he tried to carry her out of the rubble about a half-hour after the storm passed.

It was Heather Downing. She didn't know her brother and parents were dead. She was nearly unconscious, Hicks said, when he took her into his arms. "I yelled at her to get her to put her arms around my neck," he recalled. She did. "I felt a lot better after she responded," he said.

Eileen Humphrey, her aunt, later said Heather had a broken pelvis and needed surgery.

The Baysingers

On Saturday, the quiet on Cooter Pond Road was eerie. Usually, neighbors walk up and down the road, playing with their dogs, riding four-wheelers.

You can usually see them feeding their horses and waving to one another, residents said.

But you usually don't see the entire stretch of road, because it's shielded by pine trees five stories tall. Now, the tree line is chewed in half - nothing stands more than 30 feet in the air.

A friend told Darman Baysinger on Friday morning, "Whatever you're doing, just drop it and get over here. Your mom's house is no more."

A day later, officials still hadn't released the names of his mother, Sandra Sue Baysinger, 54; his sister, Sarah Loraine Flynn, 35; and his niece, Ashley Flynn.

On Saturday, Darman struggled to untangle little pieces of his family's life from the trees.

Shawls and blankets his mother knitted in shades of blue and green and pink, to keep her mind off her bad back. Her sewing machine. A certificate marking the associate's degree Sarah had just earned and was using to find a job as a billing clerk in a doctor's office.

Ashley's pink shirts and little, pink vinyl purses. One of her Barbies, with a long blonde braid and dressed in a black velvet gown with a tiara, lay still attached to its box.

And there were pictures. "This is like buried treasure," Darman said as he pulled a pile of photos from a plastic bag that had been buried under most of the bathroom and a bedroom. Ashley and Sarah, both with shiny long hair in shades of blonde and red, smiled at the camera.

Darman's mother snapped photo after photo of the family, every chance she got - even at Denny's and Friendly's, where they gathered most times to catch up. It was embarrassing, Darman recalled, when the flash went off and other diners looked up to see what the occasion was.

The crying started and stopped and started again for Darman and Michelle. When he found his mother's pocketbook, filthy with mud, he started again. "I found my mom's purse," he said. "I found my mom's purse." He said it, over and over. He teared up again when he smelled her perfume, smashed into what was left of her bathroom.

"This is numbing after a while, standing here," his wife said. All of the piles eventually will be bulldozed, Darman said. He always hated it here, the property that he grew up on - the isolation and the temptation it brought to stir up trouble as a kid. He had begged his mother to move, after his father died 11 years ago of a heart attack.

He and Michelle made their home in Pierson, about 11 miles away.

Michelle cried, too, when she talked about how rescuers had found Sarah. She was holding tight to a flashlight. They figured she was trying to find Ashley, who looked like she died in her sleep - the hope that they'll hold on to. Darman's mother had crawled next to the water heater.

One thing kept going through Darman's mind, the same thing he thought when he first saw that his mother's house had been blown to smithereens.

"They didn't have a chance," he said. "They didn't have a chance."

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at gparker@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7562.