A deadly tornado. Grieving families. A makeshift morgue. This is the coroner’s story.
The man knew his daughter was there, at the makeshift morgue Lee County Coroner Bill Harris had set up in Beauregard, Alabama.
The father knew his little girl was there because he had seen a recovery team put her body in a bag, after a tornado killed her and 22 others in Beauregard, before its path took it to Smiths Station and Columbus and other towns farther east.
The man wanted to see his daughter’s body.
It was after dark on March 3, 2019, at Beauregard’s Sanford Middle School, where Harris had established an emergency morgue for bodies recovered from the debris. They were stored in a 36-foot refrigerated trailer, with a capacity for 18.
The hardest part of a coroner’s job is telling a parent a child is dead, and that day Harris could see how hard his job would be. So, he already had thought through much of what he knew he had to do, when the grieving father arrived.
“He said, ‘I know you’ve got her. I saw y’all put her in a bag,’” Harris recalled during a recent interview with the Ledger-Enquirer. “He wanted to see her, and we didn’t allow that. Two or three families showed up there looking for their relatives, and I would confirm whether we thought we had them or not.”
But he would not let them view the bodies, because he did not want that to be their last memory of someone they loved.
“I just don’t want somebody to have to remember the situation of how they died and the circumstances,” he said. “If I can spare them any pain whatsoever, we’re going to do that.”
Besides that, it wasn’t necessary, to identify the dead. Authorities had a plethora of means to do that, some of it new technology unavailable in years past.
By 10:30 p.m. the day after the storm, all 23 killed in the tornado had been named, their families notified, and the bodies released to mortuaries. In the end, only one relative had to view a tight face-shot of the deceased to confirm who it was.
In most cases, a neighbor or relative was at the scene, where the body was found, and gave the recovery team a name. Each body bag also was marked with an address, though precise addresses were hard to determine, after the storm mowed the landscape clear of homes and trees.
Speaking to victim’s families
The tornado struck at 2 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, after church, when many people were relaxing at home. Few of those found dead in the debris had any ID on them, and the winds had obliterated their homes, leaving only hints of who lived where.
“Only one person that I could remember had a wallet,” Harris said. “A couple of the female victims still had on their nightgowns…. Some of them were found two or three hundred feet, four hundred feet from their residence, and their residence was gone.”
As he raced that Sunday to set up the morgue and organize recovery teams to collect the bodies, Harris would not see the destruction himself until the following Monday, after all the dead had been identified and their next of kin summoned to Beauregard’s Providence Baptist Church to be notified.
That was around 4:30 to 5 p.m. Each family was invited into a private room at the church, accompanied by a pastor, Harris said. Most knew what they would hear, though some still held out hope.
“We went one by one to each room to notify those families,” Harris said, reiterating that children’s deaths are the most difficult: “Kids aren’t supposed to die. Four of them were children. That’s always the hardest part of this job, when kids die.”
He still won’t detail the injuries the storm inflicted. He recalled one of the daily news briefings authorities held at Beauregard High School, where he and Sheriff Jay Jones became the faces of local leadership for a national media audience.
After one of those briefings, an out-of-town reporter asked Harris, “What can a 180-mph wind do to a person?”
Harris answered by comparison.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you with this thought: There’s enough force in that wind to drive a pine needle through a two-by-four, and I have seen it myself.’ And I left him hanging on that one.”
When he finally had time to visit where the damage was concentrated, off Alabama Highway 51 around Lee County Road 38, he saw a tree with a trunk a foot wide in diameter impaled by a two-by-four. The area was only a few miles south of Harris’ home in Opelika.
People caught in the wind faced that same force: “Without being graphic, it tossed these poor people around like a ball in a yard getting kicked around with kids. It just tumbled them.”
When Harris saw the devastated neighborhood those bodies came from, he was surprised only 23 were killed.
“I don’t know why we don’t have three times as many people dead,” he thought.
The makeshift morgue at midnight
After turning away those families who had come looking for their loved ones, Harris got ready to leave the middle school that Sunday night, when the search and recovery effort was called off around midnight.
Authorities decided conditions were too dangerous to keep searching in the dark, with unforeseen hazards hiding in the debris and live power lines down.
Harris had time to reassess where he stood and what to expect the next day.
Besides the refrigerated trailer Lee County already had on hand, Harris had called for a second one that was on standby in Montgomery. It had arrived around 10:30 p.m., one of 13 morgue trailers Alabama has stationed around the state.
Other resources had poured into Lee County that day, requested or not. Neighboring law enforcement agencies and fire departments had come unbidden.
Harris was Lee County’s coordinator for the Alabama State Mortuary Operations Response Team, called SMORT, which was organized after Hurricane Katrina to assist in mass-casualty events. He had called the state director in Cullman as soon as he heard the fatality reports coming in.
“I saw right quick I was going to be overwhelmed,” he said.
Coroners and deputy coroners from area counties raced to his rescue, forming teams to recover the dead. They came from Tallapoosa, Elmore and Russell County in Alabama and Troup County, Georgia, among others.
In the first hours after the storm, the priority was finding the injured and rushing them to area hospitals, most going to the East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika. After that, some of the rescue crews were free to help retrieve the dead.
As darkness fell, an area business contributed generator-powered lights to illuminate the middle school parking lot. Lee County deputies were there to guard it overnight.
As he got ready to leave around 1:30 a.m., Harris seemed to be as prepared as he could be, under the circumstances — with one exception:
He wasn’t dressed right.
A ‘barely breathing’ victim
Like most people that Sunday, the 65-year-old coroner had just been hanging around the house, while his son Will, 18, was on a smartphone, watching the weather.
“He said, ‘Daddy, it’s getting rough,’” the father remembered. Hearing reports of debris in the air, they decided to go see what happened.
“I took off out the house with blue jeans, tennis shoes and a short sleeve shirt on, and he and I headed down there,” Harris said. Taking Alabama 51 south toward Beauregard in Harris’ Ford F-150 pickup, they had not reached Interstate 85 before the first fatality report came over Harris’ radio.
“I said, ‘Will, this ain’t going to be good. You want me to take you back home?’ He said, ‘No, I’ll go on with you.’”
Because they did not turn back, they drove into a second storm that followed on the heels of the first. Harris pulled over at Beauregard Elementary School, parking as close to the building as he could to get out of the wind.
Soon trees and limbs four inches in diameter were blowing by, and the truck was rocking in the gale.
Harris, who as a young newspaper photographer once was blown off the road chasing a storm, was starting to worry. But it was over in four minutes, he said, and they got back on the road.
Over the radio, more fatalities were reported — three, then four, and then five.
Next they drove to Beauregard Volunteer Fire Station No. 3, off Alabama 51 on Lee Road 11, where a command post was being set up. Harris had just pulled up when a nurse he knew came running over.
“He said, ‘Hey, I need help. I got one over here who’s barely breathing.’”
Harris, who served 24 years as a paramedic before becoming coroner, went over to check.
“This little girl was barely breathing, had on hardly no clothes — they’d been ripped off of her,” he recalled. “So I made sure she had an open airway, and I did what they call a ‘spinal injury test’ on her.”
He gently ran a sharp object over the soles of her feet, to check her reflexes: “She didn’t flinch. She did not move one ounce.” He had her sent out on the first ambulance, two or three minutes later. She was among the survivors.
Harris told the fire chief then that the nearby middle school would be his emergency morgue. It was a public building with ample parking, close to the damage zone.
The fatality count was at seven.
“I figured it was going to get a lot worse,” he said. “I knew I was going to need a place to work.”
He called the Lee County Emergency Agency and told them to put the keys in the morgue trailer, because he was coming to get it. He borrowed a fire department truck, drove to Opelika and brought it back. Will followed in his pickup.
When finally he and Will got home about 1:30 a.m., Harris decided he’d get a few hours sleep.
He showered and lay down — for about five minutes.
“I was just wide open, and thought, ‘This is not going to work.’ So I got up, put me some fresh clothes on, grabbed me a jacket this time, and immediately went back to the site.”
The search and recovery resumed at daylight.
Besides the coroner teams, two sheriff’s investigators were detailed to work with Harris, and the FBI also sent agents.
The sheriff’s office had a computer program that searched up any encounter with the government someone had, with photos. Some identities were confirmed by holding an image on a phone next to a face, the coroner said.
The FBI had a phone attachment to scan fingerprints and send them through a network to match to a name. Two people were identified that way.
By Tuesday morning, only one man still was missing — except that he was not, actually: He was at Piedmont Columbus Regional, where he was presumed to be someone else.
He’d been found with a slip of paper in his pocket, bearing a name and phone number assumed to be his, Harris said. Finally someone called the number, and the man who answered said he’d given his name and number to the man thought to be missing.
The follow-up work went on for a week, before the equipment was hauled back to Opelika, and the middle school was returned to its students and staff.
Bill Harris was done with his second mass-casualty event.
The tornado in Rainsville
He had been through one before, in Rainsville, Alabama, in 2011.
Most people think of the April 17, 2011, tornado as the one that wrecked parts of Tuscaloosa, and forget that the outbreak of storms that day tore across the state, killing dozens.
Up between Huntsville and Fort Payne, in the state’s northeast corner, Rainsville had more than 30 dead, and Harris in his role with SMORT joined in the recovery, in which all of those killed were identified and sent off to mortuaries in one long day.
“Being up there in 2011 actually was a plus for me, because I knew what I was in for, instead of getting hit blind,” he said.
Of the volunteers and first-responders there, he added: “Up there, it was sort of like here. They did what needed to be done, which left me to deal with the families and the business of taking care of my job.”
The Beauregard tornado opened other chapters of his past:
Though he tried to protect families from the intrusive memory of a ravaged body, he was no stranger to carnage himself, having been coroner since 1999, and before that a deputy coroner and paramedic.
Before that, he was a newspaper photographer: “I was an ambulance chaser when I was at the newspaper, so the blood and the gore really didn’t bother me that much.”
He started in photography as a teenager, when he was handed a camera and told to take pictures for the high school paper and annual. When he graduated in 1973, he went to Auburn University to study industrial design, because he loved to draw, and his father was a mechanical engineer.
But he didn’t finish. Instead he went to work as a photographer for the Opelika-Auburn News. He left as chief photographer in 1991, and got a scholarship to go to Southern Union State Community College and get certified as a paramedic.
He went to work for the East Alabama Medical Center, retiring as a paramedic supervisor.
He began as a deputy coroner in his home county before he eventually challenged his boss’ bid for re-election, and won. He has been re-elected since, and now is in his sixth term.
His experience as a photographer helps him document death scenes now, remembering how carefully he had to frame a shot, back when photography was not digital, and he saw no image until he developed the film and printed the negatives.
The digital images he collects now are hard to contemplate. Before the tornado, the worst scene he’d seen in Lee County was a head-on collision, on the interstate, where a driver going the wrong way killed himself and a family of four in the other car.
Traffic fatalities are common, in Harris’ job. Killer tornadoes are not.
For people in Lee County, every tornado watch or warning now raises the prospect of a repeat.
“Any storm I get now, I get second thoughts: Is this going to be the big one again?” Harris said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘if.’ It’s just a matter of ‘when’ we have another, the way the weather’s been lately.”