BreakTheSilence
March 7th, 2012, 02:36 AM
We read so many horror stories of children being neglected, abused and sadly murdered. I found this and thought maybe everyone would enjoy it. This woman showed a prime example of what it means to love, nurture and protect her kids. She went above and beyond the call of duty to the point of being willing to sacrifice herself. I wish I was able to make a sizable donation to help her.
A Marysville, Ind., mother lost parts of both legs but saved the lives of her two children by covering them with her body as a tornado crushed their home on top of them Friday, her husband said.
Stephanie Decker, 36, lost one leg above the knee and the other above the ankle, said her husband, Joe Decker. She is in stable condition at University Hospital in Louisville. The children survived without a scratch, he said.
“What I told her was, ‘You’re alive and you get to see your kids grow up,’” Joe Decker said. “If you look in the basement, there’s no way anybody should have lived, let alone two kids who don’t have a scratch on them.”
Decker said he was texting his wife from Silver Creek High School, where he works, telling her that radar was showing a tornado was headed directly at their three-story brick and stone house.
She had arrived home minutes before and immediately huddled in the basement with their 8-year-old son, Dominic, and 5-year-old daughter, Reese.
Then she “just stopped texting me,” Joe Decker said, standing outside his devastated home on Sunday afternoon. “She was on top of them.”
Joe Decker said his wife, while not able to speak strongly yet because of a ventilator tube, narrated the events by typing into an iPad in the hospital.
She said she saw a massive piece of debris collapsing on her and pulled her daughter out of the way of it at the last moment.
“She just kind of grabbed her and turned,” Joe Decker said. “She doesn’t remember anything after that.”
The heroics continued after the funnel cloud passed, Joe Decker added, with their son rushing out into the blinding hail to alert neighbors, several of whom quickly came to her rescue.
He credited several neighbors who came to their aid even as their own houses were being pulverized or threatened, among them Chris Troncin, Russ Smallwood and Brian Lovins.
Lovins, a Clark County Sheriff’s officer, put a tourniquet on her to stop severe bleeding and drove her off until he could flag down an ambulance, which brought her to Clark Memorial Hospital. She was later transferred to University Hospital.
The couple had had the 8,000-square-foot, three-level house built as their dream home, Joe Decker said. He and Stephanie’s father themselves had built its large rear deck.
The house is now completely pulverized; an arched stone entry now lies in the area near where Stephanie Decker and the children had huddled for cover. A bathtub rested at least 200 feet away in a field still saturated by rain and melted hail.
The house “took about nine months to build and about four seconds” to knock down, he said.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120304/NEWS02/303040073/Indiana-mother-loses-legs-while-saving-her-children-from-tornado
A Marysville, Ind., mother lost parts of both legs but saved the lives of her two children by covering them with her body as a tornado crushed their home on top of them Friday, her husband said.
Stephanie Decker, 36, lost one leg above the knee and the other above the ankle, said her husband, Joe Decker. She is in stable condition at University Hospital in Louisville. The children survived without a scratch, he said.
“What I told her was, ‘You’re alive and you get to see your kids grow up,’” Joe Decker said. “If you look in the basement, there’s no way anybody should have lived, let alone two kids who don’t have a scratch on them.”
Decker said he was texting his wife from Silver Creek High School, where he works, telling her that radar was showing a tornado was headed directly at their three-story brick and stone house.
She had arrived home minutes before and immediately huddled in the basement with their 8-year-old son, Dominic, and 5-year-old daughter, Reese.
Then she “just stopped texting me,” Joe Decker said, standing outside his devastated home on Sunday afternoon. “She was on top of them.”
Joe Decker said his wife, while not able to speak strongly yet because of a ventilator tube, narrated the events by typing into an iPad in the hospital.
She said she saw a massive piece of debris collapsing on her and pulled her daughter out of the way of it at the last moment.
“She just kind of grabbed her and turned,” Joe Decker said. “She doesn’t remember anything after that.”
The heroics continued after the funnel cloud passed, Joe Decker added, with their son rushing out into the blinding hail to alert neighbors, several of whom quickly came to her rescue.
He credited several neighbors who came to their aid even as their own houses were being pulverized or threatened, among them Chris Troncin, Russ Smallwood and Brian Lovins.
Lovins, a Clark County Sheriff’s officer, put a tourniquet on her to stop severe bleeding and drove her off until he could flag down an ambulance, which brought her to Clark Memorial Hospital. She was later transferred to University Hospital.
The couple had had the 8,000-square-foot, three-level house built as their dream home, Joe Decker said. He and Stephanie’s father themselves had built its large rear deck.
The house is now completely pulverized; an arched stone entry now lies in the area near where Stephanie Decker and the children had huddled for cover. A bathtub rested at least 200 feet away in a field still saturated by rain and melted hail.
The house “took about nine months to build and about four seconds” to knock down, he said.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120304/NEWS02/303040073/Indiana-mother-loses-legs-while-saving-her-children-from-tornado