Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear breaks down in tears as he reveals 64 people have been confirmed dead

At least 64 people, including two infants, were killed after the deadliest twister in Kentucky’s history rolled through the state on Friday.  

During a press briefing Monday morning, Governor Andy Beshear choked up, confirming that among the dead was a 5-month-old baby and five other children. The ages of the deceased range from five months to 86 years. 

Of the 64 who are confirmed dead, 18 remained unidentified and at least 105 people remain unaccounted for.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Beshear said during a press briefing Monday, addressing those still searching for their loved ones. 

‘You’re not supposed to lose people like this, and to not know and not have the information has got to make it that much harder.’ 

Also Monday, a two-month-old baby who had suffered a stroke, a swollen head and injuries to her neck veins when a tornado struck their family home has died despite her parents efforts to save their children. 

‘At least I know who will be watching over you up there for me. My dad. God this doesn’t seem real,’ parents Doug and Jackie Koon said on Facebook, announcing the passing of their daughter, Oaklynn.

As the storm struck, the Koons huddled with their daughter and two sons in a bathtub, trying their best to protect them. After the twister passed, Doug searched searched for his other family members through the debris and rushed them to the hospital.

‘It’s the most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through,’ he told MSNBC on Sunday as his daughter battled for her life. ‘I felt like I was helpless in protecting my kids against it.’ 

The Koons remained hopeful, reporting on Facebook that Oaklynn’s condition appeared to be improving, before it took a turn for the worst. She passed away Monday morning before the governor updated residents on fatalities, however it does not appear that her death was included in that number. 

While noting the toll from the deadly storm was lower than he initially feared, Beshear said he expects the toll to increase, possibly to 70 or 80 as searchers continue to sift through the rubble. 

He noted that the numbers will continue to fluctuate as officials search and ‘it may be weeks before we have counts on both deaths and levels of destruction.’

‘Sometimes they have, thank god, gone down, other times they’ve gone up,’ he said, adding that ‘undoubtedly, there will be more’ fatalities. 

President Joe Biden announced Monday he will be traveling to Kentucky on Wednesday to survey the damage.

Oaklynn Koon spent two days in the hospital after the tornado tore through her family’s Dawson Springs home on Friday.   

Her parents – Jackie and Doug Koon – said the family ran over to Jackie’s mother’s house, where their eldest son was staying, before the storm hit.

Doug shared how they huddled together in the bathroom with their two sons laying in the bathtub with pillows over them, and Oaklynn strapped into her car seat – figuring that would give her the most protection.

‘Nothing is … scarier than knowing a tornado is heading your way and hearing your kids freaking out, and thinking we are going to die,’ Jackie wrote on Facebook following the ordeal.

When the tornado finally hit her mother’s house in Dawson Springs, Jackie said, ‘We all went flying and ended up on the other side of our neighbor’s house.’

As the storm subsided, Doug told MSNBC he looked up from where he landed and saw his four-year-old son standing there and screaming for ‘daddy.’ The boy had a cut on his head, Doug said, and it was bleeding. 

He said tried to stop the bleeding as he searched for his other family members through the rubble, guided by screaming and moaning – gathering his family back one at a time.   

Doug said he tried to stop everyone’s bleeding and get them to safety before his mother-in-law’s house was completely destroyed, and then rushed his family to the hospital. 

He said his four-year-old son had to have a CT scan to ensure the brain bleed he had does not get worse, and overnight Oaklynn’s, condition worsened.

Jackie posted on Facebook on Sunday that the doctors at the local hospital ran some tests on Oaklynn and ‘they think she has injured her neck veins, which may have caused her to have a stroke.’ 

Doug said ‘machines were keeping her alive’ and that her ‘head swelled really bad’.  

She was being incubated and transferred to another hospital. 

‘Hold your loved ones tight,’ Jackie wrote. ‘I never imagined having to go [through] something like this in life.’ 

As on Monday morning, she had succumbed to her injuries. 

‘I’ve gotten so much love for my family. Donations, prayers, call, texts. We love you guys. It really does take a village,’ the family wrote on Facebook. ‘Wish I was saying better news and I really thought this was by far of what the outcome was going to be. I’m in shock, my heart feels absolutely shattered.’

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden will visit Ft. Campbell, Kentucky for a briefing on the disaster response operations and then head to hard-hit Mayfield and Dawson Springs to view the damage and debris.

The president has already signed an emergency declaration for Kentucky and has ordered his administration to make every resource available to officials in all six states impacted by the storms. 

‘We’re going to get this done,’ Biden said Monday. ‘We’re going to be there as long as it takes to help.’  

Biden also issued his condolences to Beshear, who lost relatives in the disaster, saying his ‘heart goes out’ to the governor and his loved ones. 

During an interview Sunday on CBS Face the Nation, Beshear shared that he, like many of his constituents, were struggling with heartbreak and loss resulting from the tornado.

‘I’m still emotional after a couple of days,’ he explained. ‘Just learned that my uncle lost a couple cousins in Muhlenberg County.’ 

Despite the pain, Beshear said Kentuckians are ‘tough people’ who will make it persevere and rebuild.

‘We’re going to get through it,’ he stated. ‘But it is not going to be easy.’

The tornado, which was part of a raft of tornadoes that tore through six states over the weekend, destroyed a Kentucky candle factory, homes, and numerous police and fire stations. 

Rescuers are trying to locate the missing, however Beshear said going door-to-door was out of the question because in the Bluegrass State’s hardest-hit areas: ‘There are no doors.’  

‘I’ve got towns that are gone, that are just, I mean gone. My dad’s hometown – half of it isn’t standing,’ Beshear said of Dawson Springs.

The state, which has a confirmed death toll of 64, was by far the worst struck on Friday night by 30 tornadoes that ripped across the Midwest, killing another 14 people in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri.

One twister carved a track that could rival the longest on record, as the stormfront smashed apart a candle factory in Kentucky, crushed a nursing home in Arkansas and flattened an Amazon distribution center in Illinois. 

At least eight people were killed in the candle factory in Mayfield, a town of about 10,000 in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, when the tornado rampaged through the small town, bringing the walls crashing down and tearing the roof off. Another eight workers are still missing.

Mayfield Mayor Kathy Stewart O’Nan, talking to CBS Mornings, said: ‘This is a tough morning … but it’s OK, we’re still going to be all right.’

She said survivors are facing below freezing conditions on Monday without any utilities.

‘Our infrastructure is so damaged. We have no running water. Our water tower was lost. Our wastewater management was lost, and there’s no natural gas to the city. So we have nothing to rely on there,’ she said,

‘So that is purely survival at this point for so many of our people.’

Across the state, approximately 26,000 residents were without electricity, according to a Monday tally from poweroutage.us. An estimated 60% of outages were reported in Graves County where the city of Mayfield is located. 

Up to 70 of the 110 people working in Mayfield’s candle factory had been feared dead. However, a company spokesman on Sunday said there were 16 fatalities at most, explaining that eight workers at the site were confirmed dead and eight were missing.

‘There were some early reports that as many as 70 could be dead in the factory. One is too many, but we thank God that the number is turning out to be far, far fewer,’ said Bob Ferguson, a spokesperson for Mayfield Consumer Products LLC.

On Sunday, Kyanna Parsons-Perez – who was among the 110 employees working the night shift during the busy Christmas rush – told NBC that ‘everything happened so fast’.

‘They had us in the area where you go in case there’s a storm, and we were all there and then the lights got to flickering and all of a sudden we felt a gust of [wind], we could feel the wind and then my ears kind of started popping as they would as if you were on a plane.’ 

After they were rocked by the winds, Parsons-Perez said ‘everything came down on us.’ After that, she said, ‘all you heard was screams.’  

In further developments:

Fellow employee Dakota called his girlfriend to tell her he loved her, believing that he was going to die in the chaos.

‘I wasn’t able to get a hold of him,’ Brandy told ABC. ‘You know, so I started panicking and then a while later he called me and he said that he’s trapped under all the debris and he can’t see nothing, he wasn’t sure if anyone was going to be able to find him.’

‘I could hear people screaming left and right, and I got scared because he called me and said ‘I love you, tell mom I love her. I’m sorry, I tried.’ 

‘In that moment I collapsed because I thought he was going to die, I thought my worst nightmare was coming true, and I didn’t her from him for hours.

‘I felt like my whole world had ended, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, not knowing anything, and then when he called me when he got out of the rubble, it was just instant relief.’

But Dakota said he could not immediately come home, as he helped get others out of the rubble. ‘After we got out we started pulling the rest of the team out, and then we were able to get first responders,’ he said. 

‘I found people with broken legs, pulling them out, some were nonresponsive,’ he recounted. ‘It was rough.’ 

More than 100 people were working at the factory when the storm hit, but only 40 of them were rescued and alive as of Sunday, including Chesa Logue, who told USA Today she had restarted working at the candle factory two weeks before the storm hit.

She said the managers lined people up in a restroom and under shelter, where they stayed for 15 minutes before ‘the building lifted up and it swayed’ before it crashed down.

‘All you could hear was the screams of the people,’ she said.

Her head was protected in a five-gallon bucket of chemicals, she said, and the woman on top of her ‘managed to get herself loose and out from in between the walls.

‘And I just jerked my head out from in between the bucket and the wall and got out.’

She said she doesn’t remember how exactly she managed to escape the destruction, telling USA Today: ‘By the grace of God, I got out of there.’

Lora Capps was also on her tenth day at the job at the candle factory on Friday.

She told ABC News she and a janitor took shelter in a bathroom and they fell in a hole in the ground, under the debris. ‘He kept saying ‘I can’t breathe,’ and I said, ‘I’m trying,” she recounted of her last few moments with the janitor.

‘I just want his family to know I tried my best. I said ‘Just go be with God, and I’ll probably be following you.’

But Capps did not die – instead she was found by three men with a flashlight, who helped her to safety and reunited her with her son.

‘This is going to traumatize me for the rest of my life,’ Capps said.

Factory owner Mayfield Consumer Products was a major employer in the town of 10,000. A family-owned business founded in 1998, it had recently been hiring — a rarity in an America where small manufacturers more often lose out to international competitors.

‘Our Mayfield, Kentucky facility was destroyed December 10, 2021, by a tornado, and tragically employees were killed and injured,’ CEO Troy Propes said in a message on the company website.

‘Our employees, some who have worked with us for many years, are cherished.’

The factory also employed trusted inmates from a local prison and had been operating in shifts around the clock to meet high demand in the busy Christmas season.

A group of prisoners were seen helping some of the victims get free from the rubble in the aftermath of the storm.   

Kentucky State Trooper Sarah Burgess said on Sunday rescue crews were using heavy equipment to remove rubble at the candle factory. Coroners were called to the scene and bodies were recovered, but she didn’t know how many.

Rescue efforts were complicated because Mayfield’s main fire station and emergency services hub were also hit by the tornado. 

Not everyone was fortunate to survive the deadly storm, which Gov. Andy Beshar said was the deadliest tornado in Kentucky’s history.

The multi-state toll stands at more than 90 and is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.

That shatters the prior record for the deadliest tornado in Kentucky history, set in 1890 when a twister killed 76 in the Louisville area, according to National Weather Service records.    

‘[The death toll] is going to exceed more than 100. This is the deadliest tornado event we’ve ever had,’ Beshear told CNN, adding that in the town Dawson Springs alone, the list of the missing is eight pages long, single-spaced.

‘I’ve got towns that are gone – that are just, I mean, gone,’ he said. ‘You go door-to-door to check on people and see if they’re okay. There are no doors. The question is, is there somebody in the rubble of thousands upon thousands of structures. I mean, it’s devastating.’  

One twister carved a track that could rival the longest on record, as the stormfront smashed apart a candle factory in Kentucky, crushed a nursing home in Arkansas and flattened an Amazon distribution center in Illinois.

Beshear said that one tornado was on the ground for 227 miles, 200 of which were in Kentucky, which would break the prior global tornado-track record of 219 miles. 

The death toll across five states also includes six people in Illinois, where an Amazon facility was hit; four in Tennessee; two in Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed; and two in Missouri. 

 

Among the dead is Kentucky District Judge Brian Crick, 43, a married father of three who served McLean and Muhlenberg counties, was among those killed in the storm, the commonwealth’s Supreme Court chief justice confirmed. 

Kentucky residents, many without power, water or even a roof over their heads, worked on Sunday to salvage what they could in towns that had been all but destroyed.

And in a telegram on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered ‘sincere condolences’ to his US counterpart Joe Biden, despite rising tensions over the Russian military buildup at the Ukrainian border. 

The historic nature of the storm has led some to blame climate change, including Biden and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell.

‘The effects we are seeing of climate change are the crisis of our generation,’ Criswell told CNN on Sunday morning. ‘This is going to be our new normal.’

Warm weather driven by a La Nina pattern was a crucial ingredient in this tornado outbreak, but whether climate change is a factor is not quite as clear, meteorologists say.  

Since late Friday, rescue workers have been desperately searching through the tangle of debris that is all that remains of the factory, where fallen girders and twisted sheet metal are piled high.

They have been seen removing corpses, while advancing gingerly through the wreckage with heavy equipment. Specially trained dogs sniff the debris to find anyone — dead or alive — still buried. 

Meanwhile, Western Kentucky University, which previously said that a student had been killed, amended their statement to confirm that a close relative of a graduating senior had died.

The school’s graduation ceremony, set for Saturday, has been cancelled and the school still has no electricity amid widespread power outages. 

 Elsewhere, at least six people were killed in the collapse of the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, with another injured worker airlifted to a hospital, fire Chief James Whiteford said.

One of the victims was Larry Virden, 46, who died when the roof came down at the massive facility. He had been working at Amazon for five months, and his girlfriend of 13 years, Cherie Jones, told the New York Post the company ordered him to hold off on driving until after the storm passed.

‘I got text messages from him,’ she said. ‘He always tells me when he is filling up the Amazon truck when he is getting ready to go back.

‘I was like ‘OK, I love you,’ he’s like, ‘Well Amazon won’t let me leave until the storm blows over.’

Jones said the text was sent around 8.23pm, 16 minutes before the tornado touched down at 8.39pm.

The couple lived in nearby Collinsville, which Jones said is about 13 minutes from the warehouse.

‘We heard the tornado didn’t touch down until 8.39, so he had 20 minutes to get home,’ she said. ‘I messaged him and that was the last text message I got from him.

‘I told him where we live, it was only lightning at the time. After that, I got nothing from him.’

When asked whether she blamed Amazon for Virden’s death, she said: ‘Not really, but it’s that what-if situation: What if they would have let him leave? He cold have made it home.’

She noted that Virden ‘made peace with his Maker’ when he served in the US Army in Iraq, ‘so he was prepared to die. But we didn’t want him to die now.’

Jones said their three children are now having difficulty understanding why their father is not returning home. 

On Sunday, investigators searched the rubble throughout the day for additional victims and 45 people survived, Chief Whiteford said. Authorities were uncertain Saturday evening whether anyone was still unaccounted because workers were in the midst of a shift change when it was struck by the tornado about 8:30 p.m. Friday.

‘This is a devastating tragedy for our Amazon family and our focus is on supporting our employees and partners,’ Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha said in a written statement. 

In Earlington, Kentucky the powerful winds also derailed a freight train, sending one car flying 75 yards from the tracks.

Photos show that two cars separated entirely from the train near Highway 41, with much of the rest of the train tipped on its side. 

‘They say it sounds like a train. It’s a lot worse than a train,’ Jesse Johnson, who was at the center of the tornado in Earlington, told WFIE-TV. 

In one astonishing example of the twister’s fearsome whim, an old family photo was carried more than 130 miles before it was recovered intact and reunited with its owner.

Katie Posten, of New Albany, Indiana, wrote on Facebook that she was walking out to her car when she discovered the photo from the 1940s stuck to her windshield. 

‘The tornado that ripped through Kentucky last night seems to have dissipated just a bit southwest of us, and it’s said to have carried debris up into the sky up to seven miles or more, so no doubt that it came from a home in the path of destruction,’ Posten wrote in a public appeal searching for the photo’s owner.

Incredibly, thanks to the inscription on the back, Posten was able to reunite the photo with the Swatzell family in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. 

It was a rare moment of hope amid countless tales of tragedy, particularly in Mayfield, where entire blocks were flattened, houses and buildings ripped apart, leaving twisted metal, shattered tree limbs and bricks scattered across streets. 

That included the city’s courthouse, whose clock tower was completely torn off by the tornadoes. The historic landmark dates to the 19th century.  

If early reports are confirmed, the twister ‘will likely go down perhaps as one of the longest track violent tornadoes in United States history,’ said Victor Gensini, a researcher on extreme weather at Northern Illinois University.

The longest tornado on record, in March 1925, tracked for about 220 miles through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. But Gensini said this twister may have touched down for nearly 250 miles. The storm was all the more remarkable because it came in December, when normally colder weather limits tornadoes, he said.

Debris from destroyed buildings and shredded trees covered the ground in Mayfield, a city of about 10,000 in western Kentucky. Twisted metal sheeting, downed power lines and wrecked vehicles lined the streets. Windows and roofs were blown off the buildings that were still standing.

The missing at the candle factory included Janine Denise Johnson Williams, a 50-year-old mother of four whose family members kept vigil at the site Saturday.

‘It´s Christmastime and she works at a place that´s making candles for gifts,’ her brother, Darryl Williams, said. ‘To give up the gift of life to make a gift. We haven´t heard anything, and I´m not presuming anything. But I´m expecting for the worst.’

He said Johnson Williams called her husband overnight to report the weather was getting bad, the last time anyone heard from her.

After a wall at a nursing home in Mayfield collapsed, Vernon Evans said he rushed to help firefighters pull people out, only to find one resident lying dead in a few inches of water.

‘All I could do is sit there and hold their head up,’ he said. ‘I never experienced nothing like this.’

President Joe Biden approved an emergency disaster declaration for Kentucky on Saturday and pledged to support the affected states.

‘I promise you, whatever is needed – whatever is needed – the federal government is going to find a way to provide it,’ Biden said.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky has established a tornado relief fund to directly assist those impacted by the storm system, donations can be made at: TeamWKYReliefFund.ky.gov