Get out now, a tornado is headed straight for you.
In a frantic scramble, the adults ran outside. The world was eerily silent. Some of them scattered and the rest piled into a car, including Phoenix and her father. To this day, the adults’ faces stick with her. A woman clawed at her cheeks in terror, tears streaming down her face. Others screamed and cried frantically:
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.
When the tornado hit, her father dove into a ditch, clutching Phoenix to his chest. They survived.
“You're so young that you don't have words to define what that feeling of ‘we're about to die’ is,” Heberling said. “You only know if you felt it, that death looming over you. That pure terror. Knowing that whatever was happening, it was beyond anything I could define or ever know. It was just so powerful.”