Remembering Raymond and Teresa Robinson, victims of the 2019 Beauregard tornado
The air went still, and the sky looked eerily calm.
From her home in Auburn, Alabama, Sara Griffin knew something was off. She’d spoken to her sister, Teresa Robinson, who lived with her husband Raymond Robinson Jr. in neighboring Beauregard, the morning of March 3, 2019, and planned on calling her again that afternoon.
Teresa, nicknamed “Pank” by friends and family, would talk your ear off if you let her. She was described by her sister as “mouthy,” and was never afraid to speak her opinion. According to her obituary with Paterson & Williams Funeral Home in Opelika, her early years were spent in Brownville, Alabama. She was baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Raymond was a 1974 graduate of Beauregard High School and later completed training at Opelika Technical School in auto-mechanics.
Teresa was a 1975 graduate of Tuskegee Institute High School, and she and Raymond, nicknamed “Junior” were “always together,” according to her sister. They didn’t leave the house much, instead preferring to hang out with each other. The couple spent their weekends playing the lottery in Columbus or taking in a movie at one of the town’s theaters.
They even worked at the same mill for nearly three decades: Raymond worked at West Point Stevens for 29 years, Teresa for 27, before retiring.
“Whatever they did, 99 percent of the time, they were together,” Griffin said.
Raymond rarely became angry.
Griffin could only remember two times she’d seen her brother-in-law get riled up in his lifetime, once likely due to something Teresa said, Griffin said jokingly.
“He was laid back,” Griffin said. “She was not.”
Griffin did not get the chance to call her sister again. As she watched the lights inside her house flicker around 2:03 p.m., the small town to the southeast braced for impact.
A ‘monster storm’
Around nine miles away, an EF4 tornado with winds up to 170 mph — the most powerful tornado rating outside of an EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale — rolled through Beauregard, a town with an estimated population of just under 11,000.
The “monster storm” had a track about a mile wide and 24 miles long, and the National Weather Service tracked two other Alabama storms that day, each rated EF1, in Macon County and in Barbour County, where the Eufaula airport had extensive damage. In total, six tornadoes cut through the southern and southeastern portions of central Alabama. Two passed through Beauregard, and the first of those was the EF4 twister.
It was warm outside that morning, Griffin said. The deadly Lee County storms that rolled in later that day were followed by freezing temperatures. The wave of storms that tracked through Beauregard continued from eastern Lee County through Smiths Station and across the Chattahoochee River into northern Muscogee and southern Harris County, causing more damage but no fatalities.
But the damage in Beauregard was catastrophic. Griffin received a call from her sister, Beverly Griffin, around 2:30 p.m.
“Pank and Junior didn’t make it,” Beverly said.
“What do you mean they didn’t make it?” Griffin answered. “I just got off the phone with her.”
Raymond and Teresa, aged 63 and 62 respectively, were two of the 23 victims.
The couple’s house was destroyed. Their daughter, Tiffany Robinson, was sucked up into the funnel that killed her parents, but lived. Raymond and Teresa’s bodies were found close to where Tiffany landed.
“This is different because it was so sudden and unexpected,” Griffin said. “Who thinks of their loved ones dying in a tornado?”
One year later
Griffin has visited the couple’s grave site several times in the year since the tragedy. Once traffic eased up in the immediate aftermath, she drove into Beauregard and observed the wreckage.
Griffin said she and her sister talked “every day” growing up. Sometimes, she’d jokingly tell Teresa that she needed something to do since she “was on the phone calling people all day.”
“It made me aware of how we take each other for granted,” Griffin said.
The family does not have plans to mark the one-year anniversary of the event.
Many family members are still shaken up, from either the experience or the sights they witnessed afterward, so they do not talk about the tornado very much. One of Griffin’s sisters, who she did not name, still cannot talk about the tornado.
“Nobody’s even talked about it,” Griffin said.
“... We say it all the time about taking each other for granted, and it’s almost cliche, but the reality of how fast things happened, how fast your life can change.”
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
