Twin babies who died alongside their mother in Georgia on Thursday became the youngest known victims of monster Hurricane Helen and the storm’s devastating aftermath.
When Obie Williams answered his daughter’s daily phone calls last week, as the storm roared across the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall in northwest Florida, hitting his rural Georgia town, he heard the sound of a crying baby. I heard the sound of a tree branch tapping against the window.
Kobe Williams, 27, and his newborn twin boys were hunkered down in a mobile home in Thomson, Georgia, when they began to fear for their safety. She promised her father that she would follow his advice to take shelter in the bathroom with her one-month-old baby until the storm passed.
After a few minutes, she stopped answering calls from her family. One of her brothers dodged a fallen tree and lowered a power line to check on her later that day, but he could barely tell his father what he saw.
A large tree crashes through the roof, crushing Kobe, and she falls on top of her young son Kiziel and Kazmir. All three were found dead.
“I’ve looked at pictures from when they were born and every day since then, but I hadn’t gotten out there to see them yet,” Obie Williams said of the number of storms that hit eastern Georgia. He told The Associated Press a day later. “I’ll never see my grandchildren again. It’s devastating.”
The baby, born Aug. 20, is the youngest known victim of the storm, which has claimed at least 200 lives across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas as of Thursday. It is.
Other young victims include a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy from Washington County, Georgia, about 80 miles south.
In Williams’ hometown of Augusta, 30 miles east of her daughter’s home in Thompson, power lines stretched along sidewalks, tree branches blocked roads and utility poles were left cracked and broken. Debris trapped him in his neighborhood near the South Carolina border for more than a day after the storm blew through.
According to her father, Kobe, a single mother raising a newborn, had told her family, “It would be impossible to evacuate with such a young baby.”
Relatives are waiting for the county coroner to release the body and clear the road before making funeral arrangements.
Williams described her daughter as a loving, outgoing and strong young woman. She was always smiling and loved making people laugh, he said.
She was studying to become a nursing assistant, but took time off from school to give birth to her sons.
“That was my baby,” her father said. “And everyone loved her.”
