Hurricane Helene: twin babies who died with mother become youngest victims
Kobe Williams, 27, and boys Khyzier and Khazmir died after tree fell through roof in Thomson, Georgia, relatives say
www.theguardian.com
Hurricane Helene: twin babies who died with mother become youngest victims
Kobe Williams, 27, and boys Khyzier and Khazmir died after relatives say tree fell through roof in Thomson, Georgia
Associated Press
Thu 3 Oct 2024 18.17 EDT
Kobe Williams and her twin sons Khazmir and Khyzier, who died in their home in Thomson, Georgia. Photograph: AP
Twin babies who died alongside their mother in Georgia on Thursday became the youngest known victims of the monster Hurricane Helene and the storm’s devastating aftermath.
Obie Williams could hear babies crying and branches battering the windows when he answered his daughter’s daily phone call last week as the storm tore through her rural Georgia town after roaring across the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in northwestern Florida.
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.
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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 20 August, are the youngest known victims of a storm that had claimed at least 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 50 miles south, in Washington county, Georgia.
In the elder Williams’ home city of Augusta, 30 miles 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 neighborhood near the South Carolina border for a little over a day after the storm barreled through.
Kobe, a single mother nursing newborns, had told her family it was not possible for her to evacuate with such young babies, her father said.
Relatives 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.”
