A teacher from the Oklahoma school, wiped out by yesterday’s tornado, is being hailed as a lifesaving hero for throwing her body over kids and sheltering them from the deadly storm.
Twisters leveled Plaza Towers Elementary School, where dozens of students had hunkered down in hopes of riding out the killer tornado.
“We heard the sirens go off and then we all ran into the hallway,’’ fourth-grader Damian Britton told NBC’s “Today.”
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“Some of us had a math book and some of us had our backpacks. [The sirens] went off again, and we ducked again. They went off again, and then we heard the tornado and it sounded like a train coming by, and then we were all in cover.”
Little Damian and his pal were hiding in a bathroom and survived the devastating storm with help from sixth-grade teacher Rhonda Crosswhite.
“A teacher took cover of us, Miss Crosswhite,” Damian said. “She was covering me and my friend Zachary. I told her we were fine because we were holding on to something, and then she went over to my friend Antonio and covered him, so she saved our lives.”
Crosswhite said she kept telling kids that everything was going to be OK, as 200 m.p.h. winds crushed the Moore, Okla., campus.
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“I told you we were going to be OK,” said Crosswhite, embracing Damian.
The teacher insisted she was optimistic throughout the ordeal and knew she and the students would walk out alive.
“I was in a stall with some kids and it just started coming down, so I laid on top of them,” Crosswhite said.
“One of my little boys just kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, please don’t die with me.’ I never thought I was going to die. The whole time I just kept screaming to them, ‘Quit worrying, we’re fine, we’re fine.’ And I’m very loud, so I just hoped they could hear me because I could hear them screaming. [One girl] was sobbing, and I was like, ‘We’re going to be fine, we’re going to be fine, I’m protecting you.’ And then I said a few prayers. ‘God please take care of my kids.’ ”
Crosswhite compared the tornado’s sound to a speeding train, barreling through town.
“It was like a freight train, but I don’t remember much about it,” she said. “It felt like someone was beating me up from behind. The stuff was just coming down on my back. I have cuts everywhere that I didn’t even realize I had.”
Damian’s mom, Brandi Kline,said she’s grateful her kids are OK. Even though their home was leveled, Kline and her loved ones were counting their blessings this morning.
Kline recounted the terror she felt in the 45 minutes between the storm’s passing and hearing from her kids.
“About 45 minutes later, [my children] got ahold of me on their cell phones, but it was panic until then,’’ Kline said. “I got as close as I could [to the school] and then just had to walk. Then we went to our house, which was nearby, and most of it’s gone. Everyone around lost everything, but we have our kids.”
She added: “I still have about half of my house, so I’m lucky. All the neighbors lost everything. Like I said, all that stuff is fine as long as I have my kids. That’s all that matters.”
The same scene of teachers sheltering kids was going a mile away at Briarwood Elementary School, where second-grade instructor Annette Brown feared for the worst yesterday.
As metal beams and cinder blocks fell all around her, Brown held on to the hand of her son, a student at the school, all while believing: “I thought we were going to die.”
Brown told The Oklahoman her students were “surprisingly calm” and kept it together before first-responders arrived.
“I’m just thankful that we made it,” Brown said. “We had guardian angels for sure. There’s no way we could’ve made it without guardian angels.”