MARSHALL COUNTY, Ind. (WNDU) – A Marshall County woman says God was watching over her when her son pulled her from the rubble of a mobile home that was destroyed by a tornado.
Where all this rubble is once was the home of Alexandria Thrush. Her mother-in-law was alone inside the home alone when an EF-1 tornado flipped it over and left her trapped.
(WNDU)
Thrush and her fiancé rushed over to their home, and her fiancé climbed into the rubble to pull out his mother before first responders arrived on scene.
“She actually handed my fiancé a lighter that she had grasped it in her hand, and it said, ‘never give up’ on it,” Thrush says. “And (she) said that’s all she thought about was God was watching over her, God saved her. This could have been so much worse.”
She was taken to the ICU at Memorial Hospital, where Thrush says she will be hospitalized for at least a month.
While she begins her long road to recovery, Thrush and her fiancé are in recovery mode themselves. Right now, they are staying at a local hotel after getting some help from the Red Cross.
“I’ve always seen this happen to somebody, but you never think it could happen to you. And then it does, and you lose your whole world in the blink of an eye,” Thrush says. “All the memories are gone. There’s just stuff that is in there that can never be replaced.”
WNDU 16 News Now spoke with Marshall County Emergency Management Agency officials, who confirmed that tornado sirens did not go off when the severe weather moved through the area late Sunday afternoon.
“Marshall County’s policy for sounding tornado sirens is we’ll do it if a tornado warning has been issued by the National Weather Service, or we’ll do it if a trained storm spotter calls in saying they’ve seen a funnel cloud or they’ve seen a tornado,” says Marshall County EMA Director Jack Garner. “Neither of these two criteria were met during Sunday’s storm, and so the sirens didn’t sound.”
Thrush says a tornado siren may not have been able to change this outcome, but she suggests it might have given her mother-in-law an opportunity to get to safety.
“We got no warning, which there aren’t tornado sirens out here. But if Plymouth lets theirs off, we can hear it enough,” Thrush says. “But she was using a walker and oxygen and stuff, so it would have taken her a minute to get her out. But maybe there would have been a chance.”
Copyright 2025 WNDU. All rights reserved.
