The stained glass window next to the pew exploded after the lights went out. Sheila Smith-McKoy stood over her mother to protect her from the shards. They had come for the Uninhibited Praise Concert Saturday, but never expected what would happen.

“The lights went out in the church and we thought we should take cover. But no sooner had someone said we should take cover that one of the large stained glass windows blew out behind us,” Smith-McKoy, an associate professor and director of the African American Cultural Center, said.

Her next reaction was to text her son and make sure he knew the tornado was in the area and to get in a safe place. He texted her back saying, “It’s here.”

Later she would be thankful that a friend who was helping to fix her shower had returned that afternoon to finish the job. He had turned the water off to fix the shower and had called her son down to the basement to help him.

“If [my friend] hadn’t been there, my son would have been severely injured and my house damage would have been much worse,” Smith-McKoy said. “The tree came within a foot of where [my son] would have been.”

The tornado had sheared off the top of an old pine, about 50- or 60-feet tall, which sliced through the second story of her home, through her and her son’s bedroom and through the front of the house.

After her friend warned her of the damage, her next reaction was to call her insurance company and drive home. Despite the storm and swirling debris, Smith-McKoy made the trip home from downtown Raleigh to near New Hope Church Road and Buffalo Road.

“You could see from where we were driving that Shaw was not in good shape,” Smith-McKoy recalled.  “All the power lines were down on Buffalo Road and you couldn’t get into my neighborhood from that way.”

When she finally found a way into her neighborhood, she saw almost every house was missing shingles and minor damage, but a house in a straight line from hers had three trees inside.

“I had to step under the tree to get inside my house,” Smith-McKoy said. “It was a devastating sight. Water had poured into my room and my roof was leaking.”

“My immediate thought was we need to assess what’s going on here and get out what we need,” Smith-McKoy said. She grabbed her computers, mementos, family photos and clothes. Nothing from her son’s room was salvageable.

Smith-McKoy also had to worry about her family. Her 81-year-old mother needed to be placed and her son, who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, needed to be removed from the situation.

When the crew her insurance company hired to get the limb off the roof arrived, they didn’t realize the scope of the damage and admitted they would have to come back the next day. It took the crews nine hours to completely remove the limbs.

“Their tornado expert from Iowa explained that there is structural damage to the house and that I could not stay in the house,” Smith-McKoy said. “The roof was not stable enough.”

It will take them at least six weeks to do all the repairs, according to Smith-McKoy.

“I am just grateful that no one was hurt,” Smith-McKoy said. “Not my son, not my friend who was working in the house, not my cats, because it could have been so much worse than it was.”

Since she cannot live in her house during repairs, Smith-McKoy is looking for temporary housing that will accommodate cats and has Internet. But life has almost calmed down, as she admitted she only missed one meeting Monday.

“What was amazing was the outpouring of support,” Smith-McKoy said. “It is very gratifying to know people care. Every place that I went people were expressed their concern.”

Previous students, colleagues and friends from across the country, as well as from Korea, Tanzania and Ghana called to express their concern and support. But as she looked out of her house the afternoon after the tornado and storm was gone, she realized the most meaningful thing to her.

“As I am looking through all this devastation and the limbs down in the yard, the sun comes out and these robins were on the limbs of all the fallen trees singing,” Smith-McKoy reflected, “as if to say, ‘there is renewal in the world and you can start again.'”

“Life goes on,” Smith-McKoy said. “We just need to be supportive of people going through this crisis. There is something that we can all do.”