Mother remembers night tornado struck, injured son at Camp Lejeune

Mother remembers night tornado struck, injured son
April 24, 2011 11:38 AM
HOPE HODGE
One moment, Kelsey Salerno had reached into the crib of her 23-month old son Evan to comfort him against a coming storm. The next, she had been hurled away from the crib and buried under sheetrock, and the baby had disappeared.

That is how Salerno, 21, remembers experiencing the April 16 tornado that tore through sections of Camp Lejeune housing, leaving the Salernos’ house a pile of rubble in its wake.

“I was just barely touching (Evan) when it sounded like a freight train,” she said. “I look over and the window is busted. I see the curtain is blowing and there’s glass everywhere, and all of a sudden I get thrown to a corner of the bedroom. I’m tumbling, all of a sudden I’m rolling and rolling and all I see is gray; that’s all that I can see.”

Salerno’s husband, Seaman Jesse Salerno, a corpsman with 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, had returned from his first deployment in August and was now training for a May deployment in California. High school sweethearts from Charleston, S.C., the Salernos had known that life as a military family would not be easy, but they had never realized one of their greatest trials would come in the form of a Carolina tornado.

“You know, I’ve lived on the coast my whole life,” Kelsey Salerno said. “I know more about hurricanes than anything else. But I never thought I’d have to deal with a tornado.”

But when she was ripped away from her son, instinct was more powerful than experience.
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Mother remembers night tornado struck, injured son