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Cover Story

A Story of Resilience & Rescue

No matter how dark the night, how dire the circumstances, three Anderson University students learned they’re never truly alone.

By: Andrew J. Beckner

Tuesday, September 24, 2024
It was tranquil above the blue waters of the western Caribbean when the pilot flew into the maw of a gathering storm.

He was part of a five-man crew out of Mississippi’s Kessler Air Force Base. The mission? Get a closer look at a patchwork of storms that had formed into what the National Hurricane Center was calling “Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine.”  Theirs was a short, routine flight, the kind “Hurricane Hunters” fly all the time. They flew roundtrip, southeast over the Gulf of Mexico toward the Cayman Islands and back again.   

What they saw, and the data they collected, confirmed that the Atlantic Hurricane Season was about to begin in earnest. “Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine” had a new name: Helene. And she was taking dead aim at the Florida panhandle—and beyond.

By dinnertime just days after that Hurricane Hunter flight, Helene washed ashore in the Florida panhandle—just as three girls gathered around their kitchen table for a rare dinner together and 12 hours before a man decided to come to work early.

Students outdoors
Thursday, September 26, 2024
It was dark when the girls gathered around the kitchen table.

Outside all was calm, just a light breeze massaging the leaves of the oak tree outside. A storm was coming. That much the girls knew. But wasn’t that good news? They thought so. Classes were cancelled, after all. If ever there was a night to stay up late and just hang out, it was this night.

The storm was a respite from their hectic lives as college seniors. Final projects to finish, graduation to plan, job searches to conduct—surely all of that could wait for one night. So, they ate a homemade dinner. They talked about life. They talked about serious things and they talked about silly things. They talked about God and his plan for their lives. By 1 a.m., when all three had gone to bed, a light rain was falling outside.

Friday, September 27, 2024
It was light when the man left his house for work.

Outside, all was chaos. Bullets of rain ricocheted off his van, branches waved at him vigorously through a windshield obscured by water, by green leaves, by twigs and branches and mulch and the detritus no one sees until it’s stirred up by a storm.  

It was an hour before he normally went to work. In fact, he couldn’t remember starting this shift this early. But why wait? His kids didn’t have school today. Let them sleep, he thought. Might as well get the workday started. He hopped into his van, alone, for the five-minute commute.

He doesn’t know why he took a left-hand turn at the corner of Kingsley Road and Virginia Circle. Just as he’d never been to work that early, he’d never gone that way, never taken the shortcut up Wilson Street. But he did. 
Once there, he heard the screams.

August 2021
Mackenzie McKee & Ashley Rose met even before enrolling at AU.

They attended the same Base Camp (AU’s version of new student orientation) before the fall semester of their freshman year. Rachel Coleman joined their friend group once school started, the three of them helping form an intramural basketball team—the Hottie Hoopers—that year.

They weren’t the 1997 Chicago Bulls, that’s for sure. But that’s OK. Competition is great, but the purpose of intramurals isn’t necessarily winning a championship. Not for Ashley, Mackenzie and Rachel. Playing is about being a part of a community, having fun, letting off some steam.

Intramurals are just one way that happens, though. Togetherness off-campus is another one; Ashley and Rachel went on a spring break trip together, to Santa Rosa, Florida, during their freshman year. AU is already 
a close-knit community even without structured activities, and Ashley says her freshman class was especially tight. “We were all very close in our year,” she says.

Before their junior year, Ashley, Mackenzie (most everyone calls her Mack, though) and another classmate moved into a four-bedroom cottage on Wilson Street, just two blocks from campus. They loved that house; it became a natural gathering spot for their entire friend group. “It was the place to be,” Ashley says. And when Ashley and Mack needed another roommate the summer before senior year, Rachel jumped at the chance.

While all three are seniors, they have different plans for their futures. Mack will earn a degree in human development and family studies. Ashley is working toward an education degree and a career as a high school English teacher. Rachel is studying kinesiology and has designs on becoming a physical therapist.  

They finish each other’s sentences, laugh at the same jokes, interrupt each other, pepper conversation with phrases like “remember that time?” and “I can’t believe you did that!”

Friday, September 27, 2024
Only two of them were standing outside as the van pulled to a stop outside the house on Wilson Street.

In the driver’s seat was Storm Page (yes, that’s his real name) a maintenance technician on the Anderson University facilities team. Ashley was screaming. By her own admission, she was close to hysterical. Yet Storm could understand the gist of her message. “Everything felt so dark. The sun was rising, but it was very gloomy. It was dark and gray. All I could say was, ‘Our friend is stuck.’” Ashley says.

What none of them could see—not Storm exiting his van, not Ashley through her tears, not Rachel in her stunned silence—was Mack trapped between the massive oak that had split the house in two and the entry way behind its front door.  

Above her, the roof had opened like a tin can, the slate-gray sky and branches mocking her as they waved. “I could only see a narrow bit of the sky. It was all a muted gray, like a tunnel to nowhere. It felt like I was going to be stuck in there forever. I didn’t even know there was somebody there until I heard a man’s voice,” she says.

By that moment, around 7:30 a.m., Mack had been awake for two hours. She roused from sleep not because of the noise from the storm outside, but rather the absence of it. The low hum of the fan beside her bed had gone silent: the power had gone out. Then came the simultaneous screech of all three roommates’ phones, successive beeps delivering an unambiguous warning: danger, danger, danger.  “Once that alarm went off, we were all up,” Ashley says. “We were scared at that point.” 

They had reason to be. Stepping out on their front porch, they saw what had become of the disturbance first spotted by the Hurricane Hunter crew days earlier in the Caribbean Sea. “There were limbs on the ground everywhere,” Mack says.

It was like, “Oh my gosh, look at how close that tree came to hitting us.” Despite the maelstrom, once the additional surge of adrenaline wore off, the roommates started to relax. Ashley and Rachel returned to their rooms to get whatever sleep they could find. Mack was a little more wired, though; she sprawled out on the living room sofa by herself. She called friends and family and scrolled Instagram.  

Once you get used to hearing the same sound over and over again you start to tune it out. Mack had heard the sharp crack of so many broken limbs and falling trees, it was mere background noise. It wasn’t a sound that moved her from the couch. It was an inner voice.  

“It was like someone was telling me, ‘Mack, you need to get up and run.’ So that’s what I did. I got up off the couch and started running to the front door,” she says. “And as I was running, the tree was crashing in.”

Mack struggles to explain what it looked like, what she was thinking and feeling and even whether she was scared. All she knew was that she was by herself, cut off from anything—or anyone—that could bring her comfort. “I know this sounds so dumb. But it was like this monster stomping through the house. That’s what it was like.”  She had to face the monster alone.  “I was screaming with my hands up, as if this monster was going to have mercy on me just because I was screaming.”

On the other side of the house, Ashley & Rachel met in the shared hallway.

Covered in insulation from the collapsed ceiling, soggy with rain and unable to comprehend what happened, Ashley didn’t know where to turn, where to go and what was to come. “I’ve never screamed like I did that morning. My first thought is that the entire house was about to crumble on top of us.” Making matters worse? She’d removed her contacts before going to bed—and her glasses were nowhere to be found. She was blind.  

Rachel came to the rescue, helping guide Ashley outside while giving her a sweatshirt to ward off rain now falling both in and out of the ruins of their house. They could hear Mack screaming. But they could not see her.  
“We just could not get to Mack,” Rachel says. “I said, ‘Ashley, we’ve got to get out of this house and find some help.’ We took nothing with us. We didn’t even have shoes. So, we went outside and tried to call 911. But we could not get anyone on the phone.”  

“You’re always taught, in an emergency, call 911, and 911 will always be there to help you,” Ashley says. “No calls were going through. Nothing. That was a nightmare. They’re the ones who are supposed to save you.” Instead, it was Storm Page. “I have never been so out of my mind because I’m thinking the house is going to crash in and Mack is going to die,” Ashley says. “That’s all I can think. And that’s when the van pulls up.” 

Storm was already having a different-than-normal morning, what with his kids’ school being canceled and coming in to work an hour earlier. Then, there was that change in his normal route. “For some reason I went left that day instead of right, and I was cutting up Wilson Street.” There, he found Ashley and Rachel sprinting toward his van, screaming for help.  

From outside the house, Storm pinpointed Mack’s location easily. “She said, ‘I’m in the corner and I can’t move, and I’m scared,’” Storm says. “The house was creaking so much, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the rain was coming through. I knew there was no chance to get to her from the outside door. I mean, the house was actually leaning on the door jamb.”

Unbeknownst to the rescue attempt already underway, Mack was convinced that all she needed to do was turn the deadbolt. “I just kept trying it over and over and over. That was my horror movie moment. I couldn’t get out, but I could literally see the morning sky and the rain coming in. There were tree branches everywhere and leaves all over the place,” she says.

Then, she saw something else: the beam of a flashlight cutting through the branches of the tree holding her hostage. Mack knew Ashley and Rachel were outside, trying to call 911. Neither of them had a flashlight; they’d escaped the house with nothing but their phones and the clothes on their backs. “I didn’t know who that was in our house,” Mack says.  

Whoever it was, Mack realized she was no longer alone. “I said, ‘Hello?’ That’s when I heard his voice. I said, ‘I’m in here! I’m in the corner and I’m scared. The door won’t open and I can’t get out.’” Rather than attempt prying the door open from the outside, Storm had used a second door, this one undamaged, to get into the house. The precarious lean of the house had him concerned. What if, in pushing toward Mack from the outside, he further destabilized the structure?  

“We were scared,” Rachel says, “because we thought the house was going to collapse.” Mack had precious little room to move. Yet just moments after seeing the flashlight and shouting for help, Storm was there. “He’d crawled through the branches to get to me,” she says. “I was saying, ‘Please be careful, please be careful.’ I scooted as far away as I could to let him in.”

Storm tried the deadbolt. Nothing happened. Then, he took a small step backward and rammed his shoulder into the door. Nothing happened. He tried again. Then… “When that door opened, and that air hit me, I just thought, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’”

Storm Girls
Left to Right: Ashley Rose, Mackenzie McKee & Rachel Coleman
It was dark in the Student Center when they walked through its halls.

It wasn’t safe anymore at the house on Wilson Street. The cavalry of Anderson University first responders who arrived en masse after Storm Page rescued Mack from the house made it clear: we’re sorry, but you can’t go back inside to get your personal items. They’d driven the two blocks to the G. Ross Anderson Jr. Student Center and parked in the middle of the lot “as far as possible from any trees,” Rachel says. “We looked like crazy people. We had no shoes, and we were crying.” 

Inside there were few people milling about, yet more were showing up over time. Power was out across campus and students knew the Student Center would have electricity, food and staff to help. They knew they wouldn’t be alone. And that’s one of the lessons Ashley, Mack and Rachel take away from the experience: what happens when you lose everything you own? They learned it in the hours and days and weeks and months that followed. Belongings don’t make life precious. Life is precious because of the people with whom we share it, those who make sure you are never alone. 

“You don’t realize how much you rely on people until there is a threat, the threat that they won’t
always be there,” Ashley says. “The comfort of people has never felt so real as it did in that moment.” In the weeks that followed, Ashley, Mack and Rachel found a new house. This one has only one tree in the yard (Ashley jokes it’s one tree too many.) They kept their community intact despite the storm. By the time of this year’s commencement, they’ll all have graduated and moved on to the next chapter of their journey.  

Mack will remember that moment when she was all alone, huddled beneath a gray and rainy sky, hemmed in by the branches of a monstrous tree, crying and afraid she’d never get out. She will remember her friends who cried for help. She’ll remember Storm Page standing next to her, risking his own life to help her escape. They’ll all remember walking through the Student Center barefoot and afraid. They’ll remember the Culinary Center staff who prayed over them. They’ll remember AU staff members Tyrome Philson and Jody Bryant finding clothes for them to wear and shoes for their feet.

Rachel Coleman said, “We can look at (the experience) and say, ‘It was a terrible moment,’ but we are so blessed. We are all alive. It could have been much different. We all loved that house. It was our home. But home is where people are. It’s not the building. The fact that we got out of it and that we’re living together again? That’s something to be thankful for.”

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