19-05-2025
Survivors reflect, start to rebuild after Linton tornado
LINTON, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — The survivors of Friday night's tornado in Linton are still coming to grips with what happened.
'My husband stepped out here in the driveway and he looked towards the back of our house and he saw it and he screamed for me to get my children inside,' said Mary Hogue as she stood next to her destroyed home Monday. 'I ran inside, slammed all the doors in the hallway/ I had my children get down.'
And then the family huddled together as an EF-2 tornado passed over them.
'It happened so quick you could hear it just coming. My husband barely made it in the house in time. He jumped on top of us, and where we were positioned in the hallway, my husband was actually like up in the air and his feet were up in the air,' Hogue said. 'He had his hands like locked in to hold the family down, and he just kept saying, 'It'll pass.''
The tornado destroyed some homes and spared others.
'When I got home, my granddaughter was here and she said, 'It's okay, mama,'' said Sharon Payne, another survivor. 'Sorry if I cry, but it's very scary. And she said, 'You'll be surprised, but your house is okay.'
While her house is still standing, Payne lives in a neighborhood that was nearly wiped out.
'It's just devastating,' she said. 'These kids here just moved in, and they just got everything settled. They had a big barn that flew away. A little shed, and their house was so cute, and they're just devastated.'
Payne and others are still trying to make sense of what happened.
'We built our house in the 70s, and I've never seen a tornado here, and it's just hard to, it's just hard to take it and just see that it's really here,' Payne said. 'I just feel like I'm in a dream….a bad dream.'
For the Hogues, the storm may have taken their home, but it left them with what was most important.
'I don't know if my children would be here if it wasn't for my husband,' Mary Hogue said. 'Like, I mean, he truly saved us. … My dog ran outside, and he made it. Like we don't know where the dog was, what the dog was doing, but he made it too.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
