Obie Williams could hear babies crying and branches battering the windows when he answered his daughter’s daily phone call last week as Hurricane Helene tore through her rural Georgia town.
Kobe Williams, 27, and her newborn twin boys were hunkering down at their trailer home in Thomson, Georgia, and starting to fear for their safety.
She promised her father she would heed his advice to shelter in the bathroom with her month-old babies until the storm passed.
Minutes later, she was no longer answering her family’s calls.
One of her brothers dodged fallen trees and downed power lines to check on her later that day, and he could barely bear to tell his father what he saw.
A large tree had crashed through the roof, crushing Kobe and causing her to fall on top of infant sons Khyzier and Khazmir.
All three were found dead.
“I’d seen pictures when they were born and pictures every day since, but I hadn’t made it out there yet to meet them,” Obie Williams told The Associated Press days after the storm ravaged eastern Georgia.
“Now I’ll never get to meet my grandsons. It’s devastating.”
The babies, born on August 20, are the youngest known victims of a storm that had claimed 200 lives across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas as of Thursday.
Among the other young victims are a seven-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy from about 80 kilometres south in Washington County, Georgia.
In the elder Williams’ home city of Augusta, 48 kilometres east of his daughter’s home in Thomson, power lines stretched along the sidewalks, tree branches blocked the roads and utility poles lay cracked and broken.
The debris left him trapped in his neighbourhood near the South Carolina border for a little over a day after the storm barrelled through.
Kobe, a single mother nursing newborns, had told her family it wasn’t possible for her to evacuate with such young babies, her father said.
Many of his 14 other children are still without power in their homes across Georgia.
Some have sought refuge in Atlanta, and others have travelled to Augusta to see their father and mourn together.
They are waiting for the bodies to be released by the county coroner and for roads to be cleared before arranging a funeral.
Williams described his daughter as a lovable, social and strong young woman.
She always had a smile on her face and loved to make people laugh, he said.
She was studying to be a nursing assistant but had taken time off from school to give birth to her sons.
“That was my baby,” her father said.
“And everybody loved her.”
