POWERGRAMS

10 'Day of infamy' never far from mind Atchley saw that Edwards was visibly upset. "I'd come in and talk, and that's how I met Donna and Kelly," Edwards said. "One night I happened to mention I was looking for a place to live. We had lived in rental houses for many years and needed to move." Edwards poured out her story about Tuscaloosa's notorious day of storms. In 2011, she and her family lived in the Rosedale neighborhood in Tuscaloosa. That day, her husband was traveling home from working in Ohio. Edwards recalled, "The skies were so blue but there were no birds chirping. The kids had played awhile, and all of a sudden it started to rain." The tornado was predicted to travel up Interstate Highway 59, but it instead headed toward Rosedale. "My daughter looked out the window and saw a big black cloud coming," Edwards said. "It was a roaring sound." She and her 21-year-old daughter, Arielle, and two granddaughters, Aneyah and Makayla, ran for the safety of the bathroom. "You could see the walls shaking and the nails coming out of the walls," said Edwards, whose family hid in the tub as she leaned on the sink. "The walls peeled back like a can opener. The tub was gone, and the wind took me and I went up in the air, praying to God. I was praying real loud." "It felt like someone had embraced me and I felt like, 'Be still,'" she said. Suddenly Edwards fell an estimated 18 feet to the ground, breaking her elbow and leg and scraping her body. Her youngest granddaughter, Aneyah, fell in front of her. "She was 3 years old at the time, and she was crying," Edwards said. "I crawled to her. She noticed her mother laying in a ditch." In shock, Edwards didn't realize her daughter was badly hurt. Arielle's head was bleeding and she had a puncture wound in her leg. Within 20 minutes, an ambulance arrived for Arielle. A man later loaded Edwards in his truck and took her to DCH Regional Medical Center. Her granddaughter Makayla was later found dead, laying on a couch in the center of the road, without visible injuries. "The strength of the tornado took her breath away," Edwards said. "She looked asleep, as though someone had placed her there." Two days later, Edwards located her daughter and Aneyah at DCH. Arielle was one floor down in the ICU, with a severe gash and fracture to the skull and a collapsed lung. Arielle developed necrotizing fasciitis in her head wound, and doctors performed several surgeries to remove infected tissue. She died The Edwards family moved into their Tuscaloosa house in June.

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