Livonia neighbors mourn 3-year-old's death after tornado
LIVONIA, Mich. (FOX 2) - Neighbors knew thunderstorms were en route, but they had no warning of what was about to arrive on Wednesday afternoon.
By the time locals on one Livonia street had collected themselves, their road was impassable because of fallen trees. Cars were under downed branches, while at least one home had been crushed under the weight of a massive fallen trunk.
Inside, emergency responders discovered a tragedy.
"Heartbreaking - just heartbreaking and stunning," said Lynn Swift. "My family has been in this neighborhood for 50 years and we’ve never seen anything like this."
A 3-year-old boy named Cooper Drake was in the room when a tree came crashing through. His mom, Corinne, was critically injured as well. In another room, a 2-week-old baby sister was sleeping. She was unharmed.
"My sister lost every bit of her yesterday when she lost Cooper. She loved that kid more than herself," said the 3-year-old's uncle, Andy Sergison. "Cooper was a typical boy. He loved his cousins… ‘Don’t mess with my cousins’ was his mantra. He loved my girls so much and my girls loved him."
The Drake family.
Now, two separate GofundMe drives are live. You can find one of them here and the other here.
"Please let everyone know my family needs their prayers and thoughts, especially as my sister has a big surgery on Sunday," Sergison said. "Faith is going to get them through it, just not quickly."
The Livonia First Responders Foundation is also accepting donations on behalf of the family. The website can be found here.
"They were out there all the time, he had a little car he was driving (that) they bought," said Tom Galanek, a neighbor describing living next to the family.
It's charity the community knows all too well.
"I can tell you that this neighborhood is really good and everybody has rallied around them," said Swift.
Living through the storm, Galanek spent much of the day after cleaning up the mess left behind by the weather. He described things as happening so fast, he barely had time to prepare.
"You could almost hear it whirling around," Galanek said. "And it seemed like it was no more than a couple of minutes but it went by so quick."
Equally surprising was how isolated the storm was. Swift, who lives down the street was spared from all the devastation.
"We had no warning. We knew that bad thunderstorms were coming, but we didn’t have any warning it would be this bad," said Swift.
No warning came because the National Weather Service wasn't expecting a tornado to blow through. As FOX 2's Derek Kevra explained, the conditions that arose from the weather weren't the kind that normally forms a twister.