Residents of a North Texas county looked dazed as they inspected their destroyed homes after a tornado ripped through a remote area near the small community of Valley View on Sunday, killing seven people.
Cook County Sheriff Ray Sappington said two children, ages 2 and 5, were among the dead in the area on the Oklahoma border, where “only one ruins” and the town has only 800 inhabitants. The bodies of three family members were found at a home, the sheriff said.
The county bore the brunt of severe weekend storms that killed 15 people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Tens of thousands of residents were without power in the three states.
Kevin Dorantes, 20, was in nearby Carrollton when he learned a tornado was about to hit the Valley View neighborhood where he lives with his father and brother. He called them and told them to take shelter in the windowless bathroom, and the pair made it out of the storm without injury.
Some of Dorantes’ neighbors weren’t so lucky.
As he wandered the neighborhood, surveying downed power lines and destroyed property, he came across a family whose home had been reduced to a pile of crumbling rubble. Dorantes said a father and son were trapped under the rubble and friends and neighbors frantically tried to free them.
“They were conscious, but their injuries were serious,” Dorantes said. “Father’s leg was broken.”
He said they managed to place the father on a mattress and load him into a truck before he and his son were taken to an ambulance at a nearby convenience store.
Valley View Police Chief Justin Stamms said the small farming community is struggling.
“It’s exhausting and heartbreaking,” Stams said. “I had seen this kind of damage on TV but never in person before. It was horrific.
Most of the town’s residents work in agriculture or at local feed stores and the postal service, he said. He said many of the displaced residents were living in temporary shelters set up at area churches.
Cynthia De La Cruz said her family hopes to put some of their possessions into storage while they consider where to live.
“We’re trying to take whatever we can save,” she said. De La Cruz described the town about 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Fort Worth as a close-knit area with mostly Latino residents.
“I know when bad things happen, this community really comes together,” she said.
People were already busy putting a new roof on a badly damaged house on Sunday afternoon. A team of neighbors and volunteers from a local church helped residents move furniture and other belongings from dilapidated homes to pickup trucks and trailers.
Christopher Landeros, 19, was eating dinner near Lewisville when his mother, Juana Landeros, called him and said, “Come in the truck Come to us.
Juana, her husband and their 9-year-old son, Larry, took shelter in their pickup truck under the floor mat in the garage. The garage is gone now. A tree broke through the window.
“It was terrible. Hellish. I kept thinking we were going to die,” Juana said.
Christopher ran to his neighbor’s house two streets away to help rescue an injured man. The man’s wife and two children were killed.
The streets leading into their Valley View neighborhood are lined with twisted sheets of metal, scraps of house siding, chunks of plywood, downed utility poles and trees stripped of branches and bark.
Two young boys parked their bicycles next to an overturned RV and bounced around in the wreckage.
