you re amazing people. no one more amazing than you, julie. julie simon, david wheeler and gabriel wheeler, thank you all very much. i love you, gabe. thank you. you hear that? she said she loves you. i love you, too. thanks again, everybody. what an amazing story. coming next, hometown heartbreak. i talk to country music superstar toby keith, who grew up in moore, oklahoma and rushed back tonight for a first-hand look at the destruction. i was having trouble getting out of bed in the
it was the worst day built into one of the happiest moments of my life. i already knew my daughter and my wife were safe, and all i cared about at what time was my son and other family members. and when i saw him run down the street with miss simon, everything was okay for us at that moment. gabriel, let me talk to you for a moment. obviously a terrifying experience for you. tell me what was going through your mind as this tornado struck. i was really scared. just the ceiling collapsed on me and i was really scared. everyone kept on crying. it was a really scary moment. and your teacher, i believe, was extremely brave. tell me about that. yes. during the tornado when the ceiling collapsed, she put her hand over our heads, and she got a little cut on her hand because of a brickment we ve got your teacher, julie simon, on the phone now. julie simon, can you hear me?
with these children, i m sure david would agree with me and gabriel certainly would, was just incredible heroism and on behalf of everyone involved and all the children, all the families, that you helped save yesterday, i just want to thank you very much indeed. well, thank you. we re just glad to be alive. she is a hero. yes, she s a true hero. david, i m so happy for you that your little boy s okay. and that your school, although badly devastated, wasn t as bad as the other school where so many other young children lost their lives. i couldn t begin to imagine, i m the father of four children, three boys myself, i can only imagine the horror that must have been going through your mind as you saw this devastation. i m so glad it turned out well for you. thank you. i just know the community all came together and that s what we do in oklahoma. we just pull together as family and that s all we do. here in oklahoma.
can you bring me up to speed on that? what we have learned is there are approximately 2,400 homes here in moore, oklahoma, that have either been damaged for destroyed. i will tell you a very high percentage of the them have been destroyed. these are destroyed homes. people today started coming back. a lot of them didn t know what to expect when they saw their homes. as you can imagine, there was great sadness. one of the most interesting parts of the story is perhaps i see it as the headline while it s a great and a terrible tragedy that 24 people have died. the mayor of this city is saying that he does not expect the death toll to go higher. with the amount of damage that we ve seen here and the number of years i ve been covering tornadoes and seen damage like this, i really would not have been surprised whatsoever if the death toll got into the hundreds. the fact that it s 24 is pretty amazing. it s very sad that it s not higher. that s really the case as i see it. it c