Louis Richmond Sr. stood on the covered patio outside his Jefferson City apartment, smoking a cigarette shortly before midnight Wednesday.
A steady rain fell and thunder constantly rumbled. Lightning lit the sky with a continuous flicker of light.
As Richmond looked down the street, a bright flash of lightning lit the sky and his knees weakened. He couldn't see a funnel, but right there, about 150 yards away, was a large cloud of debris bearing down on him.
He turned to run inside, but his hands were so shaky, he bumped into the door before he could open it. He got inside, and with his fiance, took shelter in a closet.
"I've never been so terrified in my 63 years," Richmond said.
Seconds later, it hit. The four-apartment house at 428 E. Dunklin St., lifted and dropped and buckled. And it was over.
Richmond ran outside and looked up to the second-floor - to the apartments where his grandchildren live. It was almost all gone.
Richmond kicked open what was left of the door, and the children - ages 9,11, 14 and 15 - came trailing out.
"I don't know how they got out alive," Richmond said. "God was with them."
The family called the children's mother, Noya Overman, who was working second shift at Scholastic.
Overman rushed home and found the children a little dazed, with a few cuts and scrapes, but otherwise healthy.
"They were (sheltering) in my room," Overman said. "They just got little, minor cuts. Everything we had is gone. We don't have anything, but the clothes they have on."
Emergency personnel got the families over to Thomas Jefferson Middle School, where an emergency shelter has been set up.
After a short while, the shaken children were able to fall asleep, she said.
Richmond said he's been fortunate and hadn't seen the kind of destruction the tornado caused in his neighborhood. It not only destroyed buildings like the apartment he lived in, it uprooted and tossed trees, snapped telephone poles and displaced scores of families.
Many of those families lived at Hawthorne Park Apartments, at 505 Ellis Blvd. The tornado hit that building hard.
Sterling Twombly, who uses a wheelchair and is on oxygen, lived in the structure. His first clue that a tornado was approaching was the banging on the exterior walls.
"I heard the pelting," Twombly said about the sound of debris hitting the apartment. "It sounded like bullets hitting the house."
Suddenly, the windows and door blew in and a gust blew him down the hallway.
Twombly remained in his apartment until firefighters came in and found him. They carried him out, located several of his oxygen bottles, and got him situated on a bus bound for the storm shelter.
A disability prevents Twombly from living above the first floor. That limitation may have saved his life, he said.
As he left the apartment, Twombly witnessed the destruction.
"The second story of the building was in the courtyard," he said. "I'm still shaky from the fun and games."
The shelter, at 1201 Fairgrounds Road, was ready for storm victims when they began arriving, according to John Schulte, shelter assistant for the American Red Cross of Central and Northern Missouri.
"We got a heads-up about 11 o'clock, with the storm in Eldon - coming this way," Schulte. "We were told to be on standby."
Then, the Red Cross received a call about 1 a.m., and was instructed to deploy.
"It turned out to be catastrophic damage. We really didn't know until we started hearing reports about the central and southern parts of town," Schulte said.
The school is a pre-identified disaster shelter. And the Red Cross keeps a cache of disaster supplies in its office off Edgewood Drive. Volunteers mustered, collected the cache and moved it to the school to begin setting up the shelter.
"Luckily, the office wasn't in the path of the storm," he said.
City personnel moved more than 60 people from their homes to the school. Several had their pets with them.
Jessica Fath and her family took their 4-year-old fox hound, Lady, to the shelter. Unfortunately, the Red Cross shelter in the school's gym does not allow pets.
So, Jefferson City Public Schools personnel are allowing people with pets to shelter in another part of the school.
Fath said she was grateful for the space for her dog.
"If we couldn't bring her in here, we would have to leave her out in the parking lot," Fath said.
About 40 of the people who sheltered in the school Thursday morning had also signed up to spend the night there. Fifteen to 20 more were trying to go home, Schulte said.
A number of Red Cross volunteers helped people at the school, but so did Jefferson City Public Schools personnel.
Dana Doerhoff, director of nutrition services for the schools, went into the middle school early Thursday morning and began preparing breakfasts for people who took refuge there.
She and helpers made certain the families had biscuits and gravy, egg and sausage biscuit sandwiches, muffins, pancakes, cereal, juice and milk. The Red Cross also provided doughnuts.
The food is helping the Jefferson City community, Doerhoff said.
"We can do emergency feeding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's what we're doing," Doerhoff said. "Why wouldn't we want to help these people? They've lost their homes."
Mark Kiekhaefer, the pastor of Living Hope Church didn't lose his home. He lost the home he hoped to move into this fall.
His new-to-him home, at 411 Ashley St., was being remodeled for Kiekhaefer and his family. It was progressing. Most of the remodeling was done. Trim had been delivered. Crews removed concrete forms from the foundation for an addition to the home Wednesday.
Then, the storm came.
Before the storm, the home stood on the peak of the hill on Ashley Street - directly in the path of the twister.
Now, it's a pile of rubble.
"You just gotta shake your head and say, 'There's a bigger plan,'" Kiekhaefer said.
Kiekhaefer has a plan for the neighborhood, according to Paul Camden, with Spalding Constructors.
"He wanted to bring some God-hope to the community," Camden said. "A lot of hard work was going into this."
A crew from Spalding Constructors who had been working on construction got busy clearing debris Thursday morning.
"We started doing the finish work yesterday. We got the roof done a couple of weeks ago," Camden said. "This sort of hits us personally."
The crew recovered a couple of ladders from the debris, but there was little else to be salvaged from the lumber pile, he said.
"We're very fortunate there wasn't anyone living here," he said. "We're just going to start all over."
One house down, damage was comparatively light. The tornado ripped off a chimney cap on Stacy Yeager's home, and broke a few windows.
"It's crazy," she said.
Trees were the problem at the next house down the hill, where Catrina and Joshua Cephus and their children live.
During the storm, the family rushed from their bedrooms on the second floor to take shelter in the basement. The roof raised up and fell back down, Catrina Cephus said.
One large tree fell across the deck on the back of the house, crushing it to the ground.
Several more trees fell across the driveway, narrowly missing the couple's cars.
"The back deck has a tree on it," Catrina Cephus said as the couple cleaned debris away from the front of the house. "The car is trapped by the tree. But, we're not hurt. We are blessed."