Atlanta flood takes deadly toll on Douglas families

“She always went,” Robert Howe said.

So at about 2:30 a.m., she left her home on Old Brier Trail. She would usually go up Reynolds, over to Stewart Mill and over to Chapel Hill. She never made it.

Norma Howe became one of six people killed this week in Douglasville during the floods that swamped most of metro Atlanta.

The bodies of Howe and Richard Butler, who was found in the woods off of Ragan Road near Town Creek, were found on Tuesday, after much of the water had receded.

On Monday, the bodies of Kevin Michael Hodges, 29, Delena Weathers, 26, Donald Warlow, 55, and Kelli Nicole Smith, 29, were found.

Each was swept into raging waters in separate, tragic accidents.

“I have never seen anything as tragic as this in my life,” said Douglas County Coroner Randy Daniel, who has been the coroner for 17 years, before a 10-year stint as deputy coroner. “As things dry up, we are finding more people. I hope this is it. This has devastated a lot of families.”

As much as Douglasville tries to pretend to be a big city, at its heart, it is a small town — where most people know each other.

The first death Kathleen Gardner Brown heard of in the wake of the storms was that of Donald Wayne Warlow.

Warlow, who was killed early Monday morning when his car washed downstream into West Billy Creek, was Brown’s niece’s father-in-law. Another person who died in a separate accident, Delena Weathers, was the wife of her son’s boss.

Then her phone starting ringing.

“Someone called and said that Kevin was missing,” Brown said.

Kevin was her 29-year-old son, Kevin Michael Hodges. A cabinet maker with a passion for University of Alabama football, Hodges had last spoken with his girlfriend. Driving a red Honda Civic that his mother had given him, Hodges called his girlfriend to tell her that he had been caught it rushing water.

“I gotta call 911,” was the last thing he said to her.

Brown said that on Monday afternoon, as she and her family waited for news, a deputy sheriff came to her house to tell her that her son’s body had been found.

“She said, ‘we found your son and he didn’t make it,’” Brown recalled. “I just started bawling.”

As hurt as she was by the tragedy, Brown found herself in the mall Tuesday. She was shopping for a suit to bury her son in.

The last time Brown saw her son was Sunday night, his 29th birthday.

“He had just left my house,” Brown said.

She said she gave her son a birthday gift and he spent much of the evening measuring space in her house. A cabinet maker, who worked for Cabinets and Décor, Hodges was going to give his mother a gift — a new computer desk.

She said he left around 9:30 p.m., made another stop, then rode into the storm. County coroner Randy Daniel said Hodges was found off near the junction of Pool Mill and Banks Mill roads.

“It has just devastated our family,” Brown said, adding that she was hoping that her son would soon get married to his girlfriend that she described as “sweet.”

“He was so young and had so much going for him.”

At around the same time that Emeteria Howe was leaving her home to go to work, like clockwork, Donald Warlow, left his Villa Rica home at 2:30 a.m. to go to work at VISTAR, a vending distribution company some two hours away in Gwinnett County. Warlow had driven trucks for the company for 30 years.

“You never expect your husband to leave work and not come home,” said Warlow’s sister-in-law Lisa Parr. “It was rain. You don’t think about the rain.”

Warlow never made it home. Never made it out of Douglas County.

County officials said his Ford Ranger was washed downstream into West Billy Creek early Monday morning.

Parr, whose sister, Terry Warlow, had been married to Warlow for 35 years, said one of his co-workers called the house at around 7 a.m. It was unusual for him to be late for work.

“He usually talks to this man and his son and they couldn’t get a hold of him. He had not gotten to work so we knew something was wrong,” Parr said.

At around 9 a.m. Douglas County officials informed them that Warlow’s car and body had been found in the creek.

“It has been devastating,” Parr said. “We are just holding our own right now.”

Parr said that Warlow had one son, Donny, who she described as his best friend. She said he loved to hunt and fish and would keep his three grandchildren every weekend.

“My sister is the oldest and I am the youngest. They got married when I was five, so I have known him all my life,” Parr said. “He was a good Christian man. He had a good heart and he was a great and thoughtful man.”

On Wednesday, Emeteria Howe’s home was busy but quiet.

Robert Howe, who is battling lung disease, was busy on the phone with the insurance company. Her two sons, both of whose legs are scarred from searching for her alternate between anger, grief and compassion — all with tears in their eyes.

Robert said it was natural for his wife to call him several times a day once she got to work – usually to make sure that he got their granddaughter, Sara, off to school on time.

But when he woke up, he and the boys had to deal with a flooded basement. Working to get the basement cleared out, it wasn’t until noon that they remembered that she hadn’t called. Robert Howe called her job, who assumed she just couldn’t make it because of the weather. The sheriff’s were called. A search commenced.

Officials said they found Norma Howe’s car on Tuesday morning, but not her body. Unsatisfied with the pace of the search, the Howe men formed their own search party and walked the length of creek where the car was discovered.

“They told us not to go because it was too dangerous,” Robert Howe said. “I told them I don’t give a damn. If my wife is not in the car, she is in the river. If you not gonna do it, I’m doing it.”

The Howes and their search team found her body some 30 feet from the car, beneath a pile of debris. She was actually in someone’s backyard behind a Reynolds Road subdivision.

Devlin Howe, frantically tried to retrieve his mother, before he was stopped by police, who insisted he wait for rescue workers.

“I am seeing my mother. I am still trying to help her,” Devlin Howe said. “I just found my mom. Can we just get her out please? I was so emotional. They were going to arrest me.”

Added Shawn Howe: “If we hadn’t gone out their and searched ourselves, she would still be out there.”

The Howe men, get quiet again, thinking about their loss. Robert Howe and his wife had been married for 27 years. They met in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where she is a native. On the weekends, she and her 7-year-old granddaughter, Sara, ran a booth at a local flea market.

“You will never meet anyone who won’t say she is the sweetest woman in the world,” Robert Howe said. “We could not have two nickels to rub together and she would invite someone else over here for a meal if they needed it.”

In looking for a photo of Norma Howe, Sara picks out her favorite. It is a Glamour Shot of her grandmother dressed in red. Her makeup is perfect and her jewelry is sparkling.

“When I had to sit Sara down and tell her that we had lost her grandmother, she said, ‘I just lost my best friend,’” Richard Howe said.

*Several calls to Delena Weathers home were not returned and her home, where she lived with her husband and children, has been empty for the last several days. According to her obituary, filed by Hightower’s Memorial Chapel in Douglasville, Weathers as a 26-year-old real estate agent for GMAC/Metro Brokers. She was also a bookkeeper for her husband’s business, Cabinets and Décor.

*Kelli Nicole Smith’s family would not comment. But according to Hightower’s she was a 2008 graduate of the University of West Georgia and worked as a sales associate for Toys-R-Us.

*Funeral arrangements for Butler have not been confirmed yet.