An elderly southwest Atlanta woman was nursing a broken collarbone but otherwise thankful to be alive Thursday after a tree crashed through her roof during an early-morning storm, landing on top of her as she slept.
When the tree toppled onto 85-year-old Elizabeth Galbreath’s home around 2 a.m. Thursday, “it fell right on my pillow,” she said. “I think it knocked me out.”
“After it happened, I just walked around in circles, feeling the walls, trying to find my way around,” Galbreath told the AJC when she returned to her Jefferson Avenue home later Thursday morning.
Despite her injury, Galbreath found a flashlight and made her way onto her porch, where she began yelling for help.
Next-door neighbor Louis Brown said that when the tree fell, he “heard a bam. Looked out my window and didn’t see anything.”
A few minutes later, Brown heard his neighbor’s cries for help.
“She said, ‘Louis, Louis,’ and I said, ‘that sounds like Miss Elizabeth,” Brown said. “We got up and went out and saw her on the porch with a flashlight.”
“She didn’t have no power, no phone, but she was able to get up, thank God, and get on that porch and call my name,” he said.
Brown called 911, and paramedics took Galbreath to a local hospital for treatment of a broke clavicle.
After several hours, Galbreath was released from the hospital and returned to her neighborhood.
“It kills me to move,” she said of her shoulder injury. “It could have hit my head, because it fell right on my pillow.”
Galbreath, who was temporarily staying with the Browns, said one of her biggest concerns was to find her pet cat.
“My kitty’s in there somewhere, poor baby,” she said. “He’s one of the family, and he doesn’t know what’s wrong.”
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