Tornadoes take deadly toll on Ala. family

PISGAH, Ala. -- The tornadoes followed each other as if guided by rails, three times over 10 terrifying hours, straight at the little cluster of homes where Joseph Wayne Haney and his relatives lived.

The first crushed Haney's wife to death under a piano. The second twisted menacingly overhead but didn't touch down. The third blew the neighborhood to pieces, killing two more of his kin.

"It came back," Haney said, blinking back tears outside a funeral home on Saturday. "It came back the same path, and it killed more."

Haney was asleep in the living room recliner when his wife, Kathy Gray Haney, woke him. "She said, 'I think there's a tornado,' " Haney said. "And just as she said the word 'tornado,' it hit us."

Their mobile home heaved into the air and slammed into a line of trees. Their piano landed on the couple, and the rest of the house collapsed on top of it. As the wind screamed, Haney said, he wrapped his arms around his wife's legs and tried to pull her to him.

"She said 'Honey, I love you, and I'm hurting,' " Haney said.

This was supposed to be a joyous week for the Haneys and their extended family. A niece, Whitney Lawhorn, was getting married today.

The Haneys had been married 23 years. Haney, now 45, was something of a ne'er-do-well back then, he said. But with her smile and her twinkling brown eyes, Kathy had straightened him out.

Kathy, 46, liked to take walks in the woods, dig for wild ginseng and collect Indian arrowheads, said her sister, Peggy Lawhorn. She played piano at the New Hermon Baptist Church until a stroke last year paralyzed her left arm.

A half-dozen Grays and their spouses lived in a cluster of homes within a half-mile of each other on the verdant northern edge of a plateau known as Sand Mountain.

Of the 342 dead from Wednesday's storms, 33 were in Alabama's DeKalb County, much of which is perched on Sand Mountain.

Richard Lawhorn, Haney's brother-in-law, was the first to get to Haney's collapsed home. He could hear Haney shouting for help, but there was no sound from Kathy.

At 4:30 p.m., another monstrous funnel appeared and obliterated the house of Kathy's great-uncle, Herbert Satterfield, 90, and his wife, Ann, who was in her 70s.

On Saturday, the family buried Kathy in the cemetery of the Friendship Baptist Church. Herbert and Ann would be buried in the coming days. The wedding was postponed. The judge who was supposed to have performed the marriage lost his own son in a tornado in Tuscaloosa.