BRAZORIA COUNTY, Texas (KHOU) – A Texas woman is mourning her wife of six years who was killed when a tornado uprooted one of the family’s homes and tossed it more than 100 feet.
As she walked through the debris, Stafnie Brown relived the terrifying moments Saturday when an EF-2 tornado tore through her family’s yard in Alvin. The red house she lived in with her wife and mother knocked into the main, modular house, which the winds uprooted and tossed more than 100 feet away.
“It picked it up whole, thew it over there, dropped. It exploded,” she said.
Stafnie Brown says 46-year-old Jamie Brown, her wife of six years, was in the main house making lunch and was killed when the tornado hit. She found her wife’s body amid the wreckage.
“I tried to do CPR, but she was already gone. I think she got pummeled by stuff in the house,” Stafnie Brown said.
She describes her wife as loving and giving. It’s a loss she is still processing.
“I can’t put it together. It’s still not – I still think I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night and she’s there, or she’s going to come walking through the door or whatever. But it’s not going to happen,” Stafnie Brown said.
Stafnie Brown’s brother, Billy Foster, his wife Erica Ackerman and their two kids lived in the main home. None of them were there when the tornado hit, but all that is left of their home is its base and the wooden stairs that lead up to it.
“Made it through three hurricanes, and then, a tornado came and took everything,” Ackerman said. “It still doesn’t even feel real. It does, but it doesn’t.”
The kindness of neighbors is helping all six displaced family members stay in a hotel until Jan. 1, but after that, the future is unclear.
“Our house is now behind the neighbor’s house, completely shredded to nothing,” Foster said. “We don’t even know what we’re going to do. We have insurance, but the last two storms we’ve had, Hurricane Harvey and all that, our insurance refused to help us.”
The family says the American Red Cross came to the property, got their information and said they would contact them in a few days. In the meantime, the family has set up a GoFundMe to help them get through this difficult time.
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