Tornado lifts roof off home

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, January 17, 2006

CLAYTON &8212; Brothers Rykeion and Rykeiez Glasper woke to a nightmare Friday morning.

&8220;The house was ready to fall down,&8221; 4-year-old Rykeion said.

Sometime near 4 a.m., a tornado touched down in Clayton, tearing the roof off their bedroom.

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A window frame fell on Rykeiez, 7, but he was able to free himself and escape the room.

Rykeion was trapped beneath a toppled brick wall.

&8220;Bricks were covering him; I could hear him crying,&8221; mother Lynette Glasper said.

Glasper had been in bedroom in her Margaret Circle home when the storm struck. Her other two children, Kenzeric Jr. and Kenzerica Hollins, were also at home.

&8220;I grabbed my babies and put them in the bathroom and went to get my other two,&8221; she said. &8220;It happened so fast, I didn&8217;t have time to think.&8221;

That&8217;s when she discovered Rykeion was trapped.

Hearing Glasper&8217;s cries for help, neighbors Tiffany Jefferson, Billy Montgomery and Ernest Wiggins helped free Rykeion.

Montgomery&8217;s mother lives in the other side of the duplex apartment building. She was uninjured.

All five were taken to Riverland Medical Center and released mid-morning with no injuries.

And by the afternoon, Rykeion was busy exploring the rubble of his home and said the experience would not affect his plans to be &8220;a man&8221; when he grows up.

Lynette Glasper said she and her family would move in with her mother until they find a place to stay. She said she felt blessed that no one was injured.

The tornado, of unknown classification, is thought to have touched down near Parker&8217;s Grocery on Louisiana 15. The store suffered extensive roof damage. The canopy covering the store&8217;s gas pumps was uprooted, taking down the neighboring utility pole. Two poles across the road were either downed by the wind or pieces of the canopy.

Parts of the village lost power, all lost cable service and no one lost either landline or cellular telephone service.

The power went out to the Bellsouth ground unit, but the fiber cable was intact, allowing service to run off the unit&8217;s emergency generator power.

Crews from Bellsouth, Entergy and Cebridge Communications, the cable company, were working to restore operations to normal.

Concordia Parish Fire District No. 2 responded to the call along with the Clayton Police Department.

Later in the morning, Concordia Fire District No. 2 responded to a call in which a limb fell directly through an occupied mobile home on Skipper Street in Ferriday.

No one was injured.