“The next thing I saw was (my cousin’s) ... stock trailer. It took off in front of us and twirled back around and the whole building caved in on us,” McCrary said.

He and his dad had bent down in the truck and could hear the glass being sucked out of the building and debris blasting through the air.

“If it hadn’t been for that building falling over on top of us, we would’ve been blown away,” he said.

“It didn’t last probably 10 or 15 seconds, and as soon as that was over it rained for probably another 10 or 15 seconds just about as hard as you can imagine,” McCrary said. “It just poured. And then it just stopped.”

“When we got up, we were kind of bumfuzzled, and we looked around and there was nothing there,” McCrary said.

The Evans’ two-story home, which was attached to the store, was gone, McCrary said.

“You could hear people screaming,” he said. “My cousin had some horses out there, and you could tell they were all hurt. Some of them were getting up and laying down and getting up and they had to be destroyed of course. It was pretty bad.”

Plunkett had just turned 16 a few months before the tornado hit and remembers he was pulling out of Vida’s Store, which is operated as Dick Scott’s store today.

He saw a really black cloud in the west and by chance turned on the dirt road instead of heading toward “town,” he said.

“I didn’t realize what it was,” he said. “There was a big roar.”

He went on home and in about 15 minutes heard the wail of sirens of ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles responding to the crisis.

“We thought there had been some kind of accident,” he said, still not realizing a tornado had moved through Keefeton. “We headed out to find that Keefeton had been blown off the face of the earth.

“It was mass chaos. There was debris everywhere along the roadway. I remember seeing a horse with a piece of wood stuck through him.”

Killed in Keefeton storm