For a few minutes, 79-year-old Pearlie Anderson prayed in the dark, asking God to save her family as her 4-year-old grandson screamed in terror.
“He was crying and saying, ‘I’m scared, I’m scared,’ ” Anderson said Sunday, recalling how she hunkered down in the bathroom with her four grandchildren Saturday night while the wind peeled the roof off her University Park apartment complex in the 4700 block of Hickory Creek Drive.
“I just talked to him and told him he was gonna be all right. I said, ‘God’s gonna take care of you. Ain’t nothing gonna to happen to you.’ He looked at me and said, ‘He is?’ ”
Anderson and her grandchildren were among the 75 families who found shelter at Rich South High School in Richton Park after five tornadoes tore through the Southland, inflicting the heaviest damage on Richton Park.
“I wish I could get home so I could get in bed,” Anderson said about 1 a.m. Sunday. “We have nowhere to go.”
Eventually, Anderson hoped to check into the Homewood Hotel, one of the few lodgings with available vacancies.
The Red Cross opened the relief center in the Rich South High cafeteria around midnight. Red Cross officials brought coffee and doughnuts, and people slept overnight in cots and bedding provided by the relief agency. Additionally, the emergency aid group deployed health, mental health and canteen teams to the site, according to Red Cross spokeswoman Leah Jakubowski.
Richton Park resident Sherrie Shannon, who also was at the high school in the wee hours of the morning, said she planned to stay the night at her boyfriend’s residence. Her apartment complex, Canterbury Courts, was cordoned off because of heavy damage.
“The roof is completely gone,” Shannon said, adding she found a piece of it lodged in her car’s fog light. “You could even see into a woman’s bedroom. You could see her bed from the street. They basically told us we couldn’t go back in the building, and so I’m outside with nothing.”
Shannon said that during the storm, she saw patio furniture, siding, bricks, and pieces of the building swirling together. The violent scene spurred her to take shelter inside her bathtub.
“It was just loud and thunderous,” Shannon said. “You could hear thunder and lightning within it, and we were in the center of it.”
Nina Jefferson, 22, also at the Red Cross shelter, described a similar scene. When Jefferson, also a resident of the Arbors on Hickory Creek Drive in University Park, heard tornadoes were touching down, she huddled inside her bathroom with her wheelchair-stricken, 42-year-old brother and her 61-year-old mom.
“The sky was black, it was pitch black,” Jefferson said. “It got real, real dark. My heart was beating real fast when we heard the noise, and we just prayed. I was calling ‘Jesus, Jesus.’ My mother was asking the Lord to wash us in his blood.”
After the storm, Jefferson and her family were told to leave home because of a related gas leak - a small price to pay for safety and their lives.
“I think I’m blessed because nothing happened to me,” she said.
By mid-Sunday morning, about five people were left at the shelter, Mayor Rick Reinbold said. He said the shelter would stay open as needed.