Mother loses her 2-year-old to tornado while in the hospital giving birth to her second child

By Isabel Rosales and Jaide Garcia, CNN

When Dominique Green left her 2-year-old daughter Aubrey with her parents in their Mississippi mobile home Friday evening, she didn’t know she would lose a daughter and give birth to a son within 24 hours.

Green was heading to the hospital to give birth to a baby boy and left Aubrey in the safekeeping of the little girl’s grandparents.

Her mother was also watching three other grandchildren, 8-year-old Kaleb, 7-year-old Kelsey, and 1-year-old Kensley while their mother, Jessica Drain, was at work.

Green and Drain could not know that a powerful tornado would soon hit the Silver City neighborhood. Their parents had all four grandchildren and their own two young children, ages 10 and 11, in the mobile home with them when the tornado struck.

It tore the mobile home apart, leaving nothing but debris. Aubrey died from the impact and Kaleb sustained a severe brain injury. He is on a ventilator in an intensive care unit, his mother said.

They were among the many victims of a deadly outbreak of storms and tornadoes that over the weekend left a trail of destruction and killed at least 21 people in Mississippi alone.

When she got the call, she didn’t believe what had happened, Drain told CNN.

“They told me that my son was bleeding out of his head, he was laying there, he had a seizure his eyes rolled to the back of his head,” she said, adding that she feels “pain, hurt and frustration for not being able to get to my son or my niece in time.”

Jessica’s aunt JoAnn Winston lives next to the mobile home and said they never knew the tornado was coming.

“I heard something like a train … my older son was saying ‘get down on the floor get down on the floor!'” Winston said when she went to check on her sister’s mobile home there was nothing there.

“I didn’t see no house no nothing and I looked around and I seen the baby laying a little bit far from her grandmother … the ambulance had her and were doing CPR on her,” she said.

Aubrey was a happy child who loved to dance and was very sweet, Winston said.

She loved to play on a rocking horse that was later found lying among the debris. Drain said her sister, Green, was still in the hospital after giving birth to a healthy baby boy.

On Sunday, the family found out Winston’s brother had died from an apparent heart attack unrelated to the storm. Now they will prepare for two funerals while waiting for little Kaleb to wake up.

Drain has started a GoFundMe campaign to help cover Kaleb’s expenses.

“I’m praying, I’m praying for day, at night every hour every minute every second,” Drain said. “They’re going to try to eventually wake him up to see what his brain does. They say they can’t tell right now because he’s sedated.”

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