Death toll rises to 26 after tornadoes level large swath of US

At least 26 people were killed in a spate of tornadoes that tore through the South and Midwest Saturday.

The updated grim death toll came after dozens of confirmed or suspect tornadoes ripped through cities and towns from Arkansas to Illinois — where a storm collapsed the roof of a crowded concert venue.

An EF3 twister with speeds up to 165 mph tore through the Little Rock area, killing at least one person and injuring more than four dozen others, officials said.

In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.

Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi hid in his laundry room as the storm rolled in Friday. After the storm had passed he came outside to see that his house had mostly been reduced to rubble.

“Everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi said Saturday as he surveyed the damage.

In the small town of Wynne, Ark., four people were dead after homes and businesses were torn apart by the violent storm, which sent large tress crashing into structures. Wind gusts shredded the local high school’s roof and blew windows out of the building.

Ashley Macmillan had huddled with her husband, children and dogs in a small bathroom “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead,” she said.

The family was not injured a by a falling tree that seriously damaged their home.

“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” Macmillan said.

About 150 miles away in Tennessee’s McNairy County, nine people were killed by windstorms, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

Jeffrey Day called his adult daughter in Adamsville after hearing of the destruction on the news. She answered the phone in a hysterical state as she huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son.

“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Gov. Bill Lee said while touring the area. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”

To the west in Memphis, officials said that two children and an adult had died when a tree fell on their house, and officials in states as far south as Alabama and Mississippi each recorded a fatality from suspected tornadoes.

Nearly 400 miles to the north, three people were killed by the storms in Sullivan, Indiana, which left the small town “essentially unrecognizable right now,” Mayor Clint Lamb said.

As many as 12 others were injured and first responders rescued several others overnight.

“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” Lamb said, as he added that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”

Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.

The deadly inclement weather stretched all the way to the Chicago area, as the roof of theatre about an hour west of the Second City collapsed during a death metal concert Friday night.

About 260 fans were inside the Apollo Theatre in Belvidere, Ill. when disaster struck at the Crypta concert. A 50-year-old man, identified by ABC News as Frederick Forest Livingston, Jr., died by the time first responders arrived on the scene.

“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.

Forty other people were injured by the wreckage, two of them in critical condition, officials said.

In the state’s rural Crawford County, three people died and eight were injured by a tornado that left up to 100 families displaced.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Sheriff Bill Rutan said at a news conference.

The onslaught of twisters throughout the heartland came hours after President Biden toured Rolling Fork, Mississippi, which was ravaged by tornadoes last week.

The violent weather system had also brought blizzard conditions to the Upper Midwest and caused wildfires in the Great Plains, injuring at least 32 people in Oklahoma, where some 40 homes were destroyed.

Several hundreds of thousands of people across the broad swath of the country remained in the dark Sunday morning, according to Poweroutage.us.

The most impacted state was Pennsylvania, which was lashed by high winds Saturday night.

Widespread damage was also recorded in Howell, New Jersey, where weather officials were investigating if a tornado had touched down there Saturday night.

“I just heard the wind and the hail hitting the side of the house and everything. I said, man, that’s gotta be hail, that can’t be rain,” Howell resident Jim Ward told WCBS.

“Then, you know, the lights flickered a couple of times, and they went off, then went back, then went off, then went back on, then they went totally off. Then when I got my flashlight and I said let me see, and I open up the front door and I saw this darn tree down right across the front yard.”

Officials in New York City had warned of the rare possibility of tornadoes there Saturday night, but the heavily populated area was spared.

With AP wires