A Mississippi mom is grieving her 2-year-old daughter after the child was killed in last week’s devastating tornado while the woman was in the hospital giving birth.
Dominique Green left her daughter Aubrey with her parents at their Silver City mobile home on Friday evening when she headed to the hospital to deliver her son, CNN reported.
In addition to Aubrey, the grandparents were watching three other grandchildren — Kaleb, 8, Kelsey, 7, and Kensley, 1 — for their mother, Jessica Drain, and their own 10- and 11-year-old children, the outlet said.
While both Green and Drain were away, however, a monstrous EF-4 tornado ripped through the region, tearing apart the family’s mobile unit.
Aubrey died on impact, while Kaleb sustained a serious head injury and remains on a ventilator in intensive care, CNN said.
“They told me that my son was bleeding out of his head, he was laying there, he had a seizure, his eyes rolled to the back of his head,” Drain told the outlet of the moment she learned about her son’s injuries.
The concerned mother said she feels “pain, hurt and frustration for not being able to get to my son or my niece in time.”
The family is one of many devastated by the storm, which killed at least 26 people.
Satellite footage from nearby Rolling Fork, a poor, predominantly black community, shows uprooted trees and flattened residences and other buildings.
Jessica Drain’s aunt, JoAnn Winston, lives next to the mobile home where the children were injured. She told CNN that the residents never knew the storm was coming.
“I heard something like a train … my older son was saying, ‘Get down on the floor, get down on the floor!’” she recalled of the horrifying ordeal.
When she went to check on her neighbors, Winston continued, “I didn’t see no house, no nothing.
“I looked around and I seen the baby [Aubrey] laying a little bit far from her grandmother … the ambulance had her and were doing CPR on her,” she said.
Winston remembered Aubrey as a sweet, happy child who loved to dance.
In a double tragedy, the family told CNN, Winston’s brother subsequently died over the weekend from a heart attack unrelated to the storm.
The relatives are preparing for two funerals while gearing up for Kaleb’s long recovery.
As of Wednesday morning, a GoFundMe started by Drain had raised more than 50% of its $100,000 goal.
“I’m praying, I’m praying for day, at night, every hour, every minute, every second,” Drain told CNN.
“They’re going to try to eventually wake him up to see what his brain does. They say they can’t tell right now because he’s sedated.”
