As Hurricane Helene roared outside, the wind howling and branches snapping, John Savage went to his grandparents’ bedroom to make sure they were OK.
“We heard one snap and I remember going back there and checking on them,” the 22-year-old said of his grandparents, Marcia, 74, and Jerry, 78, who were lying in bed. “They were both fine, the dog was fine.”
But not long after, Savage and his father heard a “boom” — the sound of one of the biggest trees on the property in Beech Island, South Carolina, crashing on top of his grandparents’ bedroom and killing them.
“All you could see was ceiling and tree,” he said. “I was just going through sheer panic at that point.”
John Savage said his grandparents were found hugging one another in the bed, adding that the family thinks it was God’s plan to take them together, rather than one suffer without the other.
“When they pulled them out of there, my grandpa apparently heard the tree snap beforehand and rolled over to try and protect my grandmother,” he said.
They are among the more than 150 people confirmed dead in one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. Dozens of them died just like the Savages, victims of trees that feel on homes or cars. The dead include two South Carolina firefighters killed when a tree fell on their truck.
The storm battered communities across multiple states, flooding homes, causing mudslides and wiping out cell service.
Jerry Savage did all sorts of handy work, but he worked mostly as an electrician and a carpenter. He went “in and out of retirement because he got bored,” John Savage said. “He’d get that spirit back in him to go back out and work.”
Tammy Estep, 54, called her father a “doer” and the hardest worker she knew.
Marcia Savage was a retired bank teller. She was very active at their church and loved being there as often as she could, said granddaughter Katherine Savage, 27. She had a beautiful voice and was always singing, especially gospel. Estep said her mother loved cooking for her family, making an awesome turkey for Thanksgiving and known for her banana pudding.
Condolences posted on social media remembered the couple as generous, kind and humble.
John and Katherine spent many years of their childhood living in a trailer behind their grandparents’ house, and John and his father had been staying with his grandparents for the last few years. Even with some of the recent storms to hit their community, trees fell further up in the yard and “we had not had anything like that happen” before, he said.
Over decades, the house would fill with family for Thanksgiving and Christmas, plus Easter egg hunts in the large yard.
A GoFundMe organized for their funeral expenses says they were survived by their son and daughter, along with four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Katherine Savage said her grandparents, especially Marcia, always offered to help her with her own three sons and would see the boys almost every day.
“I haven’t even told my boys yet because we don’t know how,” she said.
The two were teenage sweethearts and married for over 50 years. Estep said their love was “immediate, and it was everlasting.”
“They loved each other to their dying day,” John Savage said.
Hannah Fingerhut, The Associated Press