Georgia father Obie Lee Williams spent every morning looking forward to a daily phone call from his daughter. But their last conversation was fraught with fear as Kobe Williams, 27, told her father that she and her newborn twins were hunkering down alone at their trailer home in Thomson as Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeast. Before hanging up to check on his other kids, he urged her to shelter in the bathroom with her month-old babies until the storm passed.
Minutes later, she was no longer answering her family’s calls. One of her brothers dodged fallen trees and downed power lines to check on her later that day, and he could barely bear to tell his father what he saw. A large tree had fallen through the roof, crushing Kobe and causing her to fall on top of infant sons Khyzier and Khazmir.
All three were found dead. “I’d seen pictures when they were born and pictures every day since, but I hadn’t made it out there yet to meet them,” Obie Lee Williams told The Associated Press days after the storm . “Now I’ll never get to meet my grandsons.
It’s devastating.” The babies, born Aug. 20, are the youngest known victims of a storm that had claimed 200 lives as of Thursday.
Among the other young victims are a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy from about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south in Washington County, Georgia. In the elder Williams’ home city of , 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of his daughter’s home in Thomson, power lines stretched along the .
