Friend: Woman grabbed baby, ran for cover before dying in storm

July 25, 2008 02:12 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff, and Ryan Kost, Globe Correspondent

DEERFIELD, N.H. -- As a tornado barreled down on her log cabin in Deerfield, N.H., on Thursday, 57-year-old Brenda J. Stevens grabbed her 3-month-old grandson and ran for cover, a friend said today.

As the storm ripped open the cabin, it grabbed Stevens’s husband, Harley, and “threw Harley out of the house,” said the friend, Christine McGovern, who spoke to the Stevens’s relatives and neighbors after the storm.

“And with that, he yelled to one neighbor, ‘Call 911!’ because he knew Brenda was still in there with the baby,” McGovern said.

Brenda Stevens never made it out, the lone fatality of the destructive storm. “She was dead, but the baby was still alive,” McGovern said. “I think she was the angel.”

McGovern said Stevens never had time to escape. "The house had just collapsed,” she said in a telephone interview. “In the three minutes that thing went by, she grabbed the baby, and that was that for her.”

Firefighters responded, struggling past downed power lines and felled trees on Sleepy Hollow Lane. They found the house in ruins and Stevens’s body lying in the rubble, Chief Stewart Yeaton of the Fire Department in neighboring Epsom, N.H, said at a press conference today.

“They were crawling through the debris, and they were able to see her in the rubble,” Yeaton said. “They could tell she was dead.”

Firefighters also knew an infant was alive in the rubble.

“As they were doing the rescue," Yeaton said, "they could hear the baby crying in the background.”

Firefighters used poles and inflatable airbags to lift the rubble and prevent it from collapsing further, he said. They found the infant a few feet from Brenda Stevens. The boy was unscathed, his body inches from heavy debris.

Firefighters carried the child out, said Robert Blodgett, chairman of the Epsom select board.

“It was responding,” Blodgett said today, "and it was in pretty fair condition."

Yeaton was stunned.

“An act of God, I guess, I guess,” the chief said.

McGovern recalled Brenda Stevens, a mother of two daughters, as a woman who was cheerful and quick to joke.

“She loved her family, and her husband loved her,” McGovern said “They were just a happy-go-lucky couple.”

The baby was the son of one of Harley Stevens’s two sons from a previous marriage, she said. He was released from the hospital today.

“Lucky it didn’t kill him,” Yeaton said.