Phoenix couple makes vacation detour to help tornado victims
Jun 3, 2013, 5:00 AM | Updated: 6:16 am
PHOENIX — A Phoenix couple were on their way to a romantic destination, but when tornadoes struck the Oklahoma City area over a week ago, their vacation turned into something else.
Casey Jones and his wife Lori were on a driving trip to Niagara Falls. They had made it to Nebraska when they heard that a massive tornado had struck Moore, Oklahoma.
They felt a calling to turn their car and head there instead.
“It was kind of like we were led,” said Casey. “I just kept talking about it with my wife saying, Maybe we should go there. Maybe we should do something.”
Appearing this past Saturday on KTAR’s “Arizona’ Morning News Weekend with Gayle Bass and Bob McClay,” Casey said he couldn’t believe what he saw when they got to Moore.
At first it wasn’t so bad, they were in an area where Casey said the damage was about equivalent to a Phoenix monsoon storm. But they kept driving, and things looked very different.
“On both sides of the road, everything was like a bomb went off, I mean it was just leveled,” said Casey. “There was a shopping center that was mostly down. There’s buildings that you couldn’t tell what they were anymore. They were just gone.”
The couple found a local church and asked what they could do to help. They were immediately asked to deliver 400 lunches to people trying to clean up the mess that had been their homes. They were given a map and told to go into one of the hardest hit areas, near an elementary school that was destroyed by the twister.
“It was really hard to give away the 400 lunches,” said Casey. “People would say, ‘Oh no, give it to someone who needs it.’ They were standing there and they haven’t eaten lunch or anything else that day. We would have to say, ‘I’m sorry, but you need it.’ We would basically have to talk them into taking it because they were worried about other people who might need it.”
They also worked with the church and Samaritan’s Purse to help residents clean up their damaged homes. Samaritan’s Purse is a Christian relief organization run by Franklin Graham, the son of Evangelist Billy Graham.
Casey says people in Moore need food and supplies, but they also need something else.
“They need people to love on them,” he said. “To just talk them through it. They’ve lost everything. You just have to totally respect them and help them understand why it happened to them.”
After spending several days in Moore, Casey and Lori decided to leave the area, and they resumed their journey on Friday. They left Oklahoma City just three hours before another round of devastating tornadoes struck the area that night.
Casey and Lori don’t want any credit for making the detour to help in Oklahoma. They said that they were led by God to do what they did, and they are giving him all of the glory.
