This 10-year-old Beauregard tornado victim shared ‘the love of God’ with sign language
She played dolls with her best friend during the last hour of her life.
As the one-year anniversary of the Lee County, Alabama, tornado approaches, Ashley and David Thornton of Beauregard still find comfort in knowing that’s what their 10-year-old daughter, Taylor, was doing just before she died.
In an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, they said their shared Christian faith helps them function through their grief.
“There is hope even in the storm,” David said. “Even in your lowest lows, there is hope in God to get through any tragedy.”
Taylor was among the 23 victims of the March 3, 2019, tornado. She went camping that weekend with Kayla Grimes, 11, and Kayla’s father, Marshall Lynn Grimes, as well as his fiancée, Sheila Creech.
Before that Sunday’s storm, they returned to Grimes’ mobile home. They huddled in the bathtub as the tornado hit, David said Kayla told him. Kayla was the lone survivor.
Taylor was a fourth-grader at Lee-Scott Academy in Auburn.
Her smile, David said, “was just infectious with that beaming glow of hers.”
Taylor smiled a lot and made others smile, too.
“Humor was her thing,” David said. “She would make a funny face or do something funny, you couldn’t help but laugh.”
She liked to eat hamburgers and pizza. She liked the musical “The Greatest Showman” and silly songs like “Baby Shark” and “What Does the Fox Say?”
Taylor also liked the worship song “10,000 Reasons,” which she learned to perform in sign language. The song was played at her funeral and again at what would have been her 11th birthday celebration in October. It declares, in part:
“Whatever may pass
And whatever lies before me
Let me be singing
When the evening comes.”
“She got to share the love of God,” David said. “It’s just who she was. … From the time she woke up to the time she went to sleep, she was living life to the fullest.”
Dealing with this loss has tested their faith, stretched it and “rocked it to its core,” David said.
“It definitely hits you right in the gut,” Ashley said, “and everybody sees what you’re made of, I guess, whether you’re going to just fall to the bottom and stay there, or are you going to climb your way back to the top.”
Their friends at Gateway Family Church have helped them out of that hole.
“We have leaned on our church body, we have leaned hard on our friends and our family,” David said, “and they’ve all rose to the occasion and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got you.’”
David is a pharmacy technician at Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Ashley works at Bubba’s Medicine Shop in Opelika. They also are lay leaders in their church.
“By the grace of God, I get up every morning, and I go to work,” David said. “I do what I have to do as a father, I do what I do as a husband, as a leader in our church, as an employee. I can’t quit. … In all that, I believe that we have become stronger. We’ve become stronger as a family.”
They alternate between giving and receiving support.
“I’m broken, but I’m here for her,” David said. “She’s broken; she’s here for me.”
They have a son, McCrae, who will be 2 years old in April. David said he will tell him Taylor was so excited to have a baby brother, she insisted on holding him before daddy.
Asked what she wants McCrae to know about his sister, Ashley teared up and said, “How sweet she was and how much she loved him.”
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
