SELMER, Tennessee — She pulled Polaroid pictures from the debris pile that was once her home.

Stacy Thompson sifted through the rubble in this flat, warped landscape of schrapnel and debris. She picked the pictures out of the clay mud.

The tornado had taken the house, which just a day before had been perched on the hill between West Cherry and Cypress avenues in downtown Selmer, a community of 4,500 people here in West Tennessee’s McNairy County.

The house had belonged to her mother, Lola Weatherly. It was one of at least a dozen homes completely demolished by the storm. As of Thursday morning, at least four people were confirmed dead across Tennessee, with some residents still missing.

It was the second time in two years a tornado devastated a tight-knit community here in McNairy County. Nearly two years to the day, a twister tore through areas near Bethel Springs and Adamsville, leaving nine people dead. 

On Thursday afternoon, Thompson found her mother’s pictures, one by one. Children and grandchildren at play, posing at family events, smirking mischievously at the camera.

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“We can lose some photos,” Thompson said through tears. “I don’t have to have a picture. At least she’s here.”

The debris pile hardly resembled what was once a home. But Weatherly was − by scant miracle − not there during the storm.

Thompson described her as a staunchly independent woman who “really did not want to go to her brother’s house for the storm.”

A man walks through the debris of Purdy Place Apartments on New Bethel Rd. during the aftermath of tornadoes that rocked Selmer, Tennessee in the early morning on Thursday, April 3, 2025.

Thompson was able to convince Weatherly to go.

“She likes living by herself, you know,” Thompson said. “But I told her she could have been one of those that didn’t make it.”

Weatherly is a bustling regular presence in town. She was the previous owner of the town-favorite Rockabilly Cafe for nearly 12 years and now works for the local Retro Dawgs Restaurant.

“Everybody knows my Mama,” Thompson said. “Everybody loves her.”

Thompson described the moment she heard the tornado had hit her mother’s neighborhood.

“I just called and called,” she said. “I got ahold of her and she was just screaming. Just screaming, ‘Baby, my house is gone. My home is gone.'”

Thompson paused to compose herself.

Josh Barnes stands in his father Paul Floyd’s destroyed home holding suits for Floyd after a suspected tornado tore through Selmer, Tenn., early Thursday morning on April 3, 2025. Floyd said he, his wife and mother-in-law rode out the storm in the hallway of the house. Barnes told his father as they left he was able to find 5 suits. “That’s good, as long as I’ve got something,” Floyd said.

“I said Mama, we can replace that stuff. But I cannot replace you.”

At that very moment, a volunteer worker came over with a pink, water-logged Bible.

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“That’s Mama’s!” Thompson said, flipping through the sticking, but intact, pages. “I gave this to her for Mother’s Day.”

The front page of the Bible? A single sentence scrawled in Lola’s handwriting: “My children are my life!”

Further down the hill, Hosea Cabrera stood clutching his side and surveying the muddy streak of land that was once the trailer he shared with his girlfriend, Jesse Furman.

Cabrera said he lived in the area for about eight years after moving from California. This storm was the “worst he’s ever seen.”

Wathon Wilbanks and Seth Davis work to clear a road of debris in Selmer, Tenn., after a suspected tornado tore through the town early Thursday morning on April 3, 2025. Wilbanks and Davis came from Milledgeville and Savannah, Tenn., respectively to help out when they heard the news of the storm.

“It woke me up, and then it hit the trailer,” he said. “It threw me up in it. I went flying. Then it slammed me into the ground.”

Furman said she was trying to hold onto Cabrera when the tornado struck the trailer with “one hand on the bed frame, and another on his ankle” before it flung him away.

Cabrera said he flew about 50 feet in the air before plummeting to the ground.

“It just whistled,” he said. “It was so loud.”

The two found each other in the dark, barefoot, and surrounded by destruction.

“Within minutes, the whole trailer just came apart,” Furman said. “I woke up on the ground, covered in a wet blanket.”

Cabrera had blood splattered across his shirt among the mud stains. He lifted his shirt to reveal a row of staples across his abdomen, which he got at the hospital.

He said it hurts, but what was really bothering him was the exhaustion.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I’ve only had 20 minutes of sleep today. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the tornado.”

Still, he said, they were the lucky ones.

“It could’ve been a lot worse,” he said, glancing toward the wreckage of an imploded trailer nearby. The man in that trailer died, Cabrera said.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Selmer, tornado: Damage leaves devastation in rural Tennessee