EVANSVILLE — Finding himself with time on his hands and curiosity that had festered for years, Noah Donner drove over to the former Eastbrook Mobile Home Park. No one else was around.
There were no sirens there, no commotion. No first responders. No one madly running about looking for survivors. No devastation. No little sister or father, either, and none of the friends and family that once noisily buzzed around them all in this place. There was just silence.
Emily and Jesse Donner are frozen in time in Noah’s head as they were the night they were killed with 18 other Eastbrook residents by the tornado of Nov. 6, 2005. The night the winds seized Noah, then eight years old, and blew him the length of two football fields as he clung to his mattress. Tangled in the mattress’s innards and knocked out cold by flying debris, the boy landed in a ditch and laid there for more than 12 hours, covered first by the floor of a mobile home and then by a car.
The tornado left Noah battered, bruised, burned and broken within an inch of his life. In a two-hour interview with the Courier & Press, he relived that experience in vivid detail.
“I’m not a big believer in miracles, but it definitely was a miracle that I survived,” Donner says early on in the interview.
But Noah Donner’s feelings about that night and the way it altered the trajectory of his life are more complicated than that. Now 28, he admits that for a time, he was angry at God for sparing him but taking 6-year-old Emily, who was sleeping in the next room, and his father, Jesse. Noah’s mother, Crystal Donner, was seriously injured but survived.
“I always grew up Baptist, Southern Baptist,” Noah said later. “I always grew up believing in God, believing in miracles and stuff. But after that tornado, and then learning about my sister and my dad and processing that, I lost faith for a while. I was like, ‘Why am I here and they’re not?'”
Donner long ago made peace with the fact that he’ll never get the answer to that question — but he still struggles with his faith sometimes. He’s older now than his father was then. He’s not in a relationship right now, but he has found a job as a pest control technician that he likes, and his feelings are…. so confusing. Survivor’s guilt one day, profound gratitude the next.
There are “PTSD flashbacks” too, Donner said. They come whenever major storms, thunder and lightning and other loud noises come, which is often. He lives a stone’s throw from a train track.
“Whenever I hear that going through, I’m like, still kind of…” he says, his voice trailing off.
Why?
Donner has been to the mobile home park, now called Waterford Pointe, twice in a search for answers. He was drawn each time to 325 Spy Glass Drive, the now-empty lot where he and Emily rode their bikes with other Eastbrook kids and his parents hosted family get-togethers. Funny, Donner thought, the slab that was there in 2005 is still there.
He has a million stories about Emily, the spunky and funny little girl who insisted on playing baseball with the boys. Emily, who was younger but taller than him and not afraid to mix it up with bullies. Emily, who had her long, naturally curly jumble of hair cut and straightened to resemble her beloved Barbie dolls. Those stories make him laugh.
Jesse Donner, an estimator and installer for a window company, drove his kids to school every day. He coached their sports teams and conducted Cub Scout meetings in the trailer in his capacity as a den leader. Jesse had big dreams. A high school graduate who had married at 18, he planned to surprise his father with the news that he’d enrolled in college. He was just 26 years old.
It’s a lot, Noah says.
There are other stories too, stories that until now Noah Donner has never told.
‘I could barely breathe’
It sounded like a freight train rumbling through the trailer, Donner remembers. Jolted awake, the boy had barely a second to register one thought before all hell broke loose. He flashed on something his great-grandfather had told him.
“(He was) telling me that if a tornado ever happens, if you can’t get to the bathroom, to try to roll yourself up in a mattress,” Donner says.
He never would have had time to do that if he hadn’t already been in bed.
The next thing Noah knew, he was desperately clinging with all four limbs to his mattress as winds of up to 180 mph violently sucked him and it out through his bedroom window. He was airborne instantly.
It wasn’t a magical carpet ride. Having smacked against the edges of the window on his way out, Donner immediately began taking incoming fire from splintered pieces of wood and other debris. He couldn’t breathe for all the dirt and wind swirling around him.
Quickly, a metal pipe slammed into his head. He doesn’t remember anything about his flight after that.
The tornado shot over Eastbrook like a giant weedeater in less than a minute. Donner’s hellish flight over the mobile home park on the mattress was fast, furious and terrifying — and then, as abruptly as it had begun, it ended. Rescuers would later surmise he’d flown hundreds of yards on the mattress before piledriving into a long, deep ditch, which was quickly covered by the floor of a mobile home and a car.
Above the ditch, life had stopped for nearly 20 people. A frantic search-and-rescue mission for the survivors began.
But nobody could see Donner underneath all that debris and in the dark. He slipped in and out of consciousness, waking up by his own estimation only after eight hours had passed.
“Stuff was all around me and on top of me,” Donner says. “I remember I could barely breathe. Somehow, I was encased in the mattress, with springs there and everything. I could not remember what had happened. I was so concussed.”
As the cobwebs cleared, the boy surveyed his injuries. At the time, he knew only that he was in a world of pain. Everything hurt every time he tried to move.
To make matters worse, he could see out of only his left eye. The other eye was “all bloody and stuff.” The boy wondered whether he might be blind.
“I had a metal rod that was sticking into my thigh,” Donner recalls. “I had a severe, shattered broken ankle. I had three broken ribs, one that punctured my lung and one that was close to puncturing my heart. I had a severe concussion, brain damage due to that piece of metal hitting me.”
Donner says he also was partially scalped, though the hair did grow back. He lost part of his right ear. And oh yeah, he recalls, ticking off his injuries, he sustained a broken clavicle. Courier & Press reporting at the time mentioned he’d also suffered numerous burns and abrasions and lost a toe that was reattached.
It would be hours still until rescuers finally got the car off the mobile home floor and removed it all to get into the ditch underneath and pull Donner out. When they did, they found unexpected levity and life.
The light comes back in
Donner remembers hearing afterward about a search and rescue dog that would not leave the ditch where he had lain for hours among the rubble. At some point, he heard someone yelling into the ditch. In moments of lucidity, he had been yelling for his parents and Emily.
Gradually, Donner says, his good eye fixed on “a little sliver of light,” some pieces of wood and some pipes. He could hear dogs outside.
“I just remember seeing some light and then I remember hearing people pull stuff off and them screaming down to me, ‘Is anybody there?'” he said. “I just remember screaming up, ‘Yes, I’m here.’ And then the next thing they asked was, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I remember screaming that I’m a boy.”
There would be one last moment of terror before Donner could be rescued. At the sound of chainsaws being used to clear debris, the boy fled as far away as he could in the ditch, jamming himself into a corner in fear that he might be accidentally ripped apart by the whirring blades.
Finally, at about 4:30 p.m., Donner was hauled by rope out of what been his tomb for more than 12 hours. He was immediately put on a stretcher.
Ginger Raley, the boy’s maternal grandmother, told the Courier & Press at the time that something came out of the boy’s mouth at the moment of his rescue that surprised everyone. Donner burst into gales of laughter when asked about it.
“The rescue workers told us the first thing he said when they got him out was, ‘I’m thirsty, can you get me a Mountain Dew? If you can’t, I’ll settle for a Dr. Pepper,'” Raley said.
Donner said he might have been suffering the effects of his concussion when he said that. He has been told he impatiently brushed aside all inquiries about his injuries at the scene to press his demand for the soft drink.
“The funny thing is, I never really drank Mountain Dew when I was younger,” he said, still laughing. “I just wanted a Mountain Dew.”
There was another revelation upon Donner’s rescue. Under the little boy’s right armpit, a tiny peachfaced lovebird somehow had kept breathing throughout the entire ordeal. Through his pain and delirium, Noah hadn’t noticed his companion.
The little lovebird came up with Donner when he was rescued. He remembers being told it was still nestled under his armpit.
Afterward, the owner of the little bird that had shared Donner’s darkest hours gave the creature to him as a new pet. The boy, who had lost his dog to the tornado, called the bird, “Mr. Peepers.”
“I had that bird for years,” Donner recalled. “It passed away a couple of years ago.”
The question
Battered but happy to be alive, Noah at the hospital asked the question he had been asking since he slammed into the ditch with only his mattress to soften the blow.
What happened to Emily and his dad?
They passed away, Raley gently told him.
“At that time I couldn’t really process it,” Donner says. “They had me on so much medication. I just didn’t know what happened.”
The boy had heard the words, but he would need time to process them.
The man? He has memories of Emily, to whom he was especially close, that are as vivid as if they happened yesterday.
Once he and Emily were playing organized T-ball, and this kid on Noah’s team was hassling him, he recalled.
“I remember Emily saying, ‘Hey, don’t mess with my mom or brother,’ and (the kid) said, ‘What are you gonna do about it?!’” Donner said, laughing at the memory. “And she walked over and said, ‘This,’ and just popped him right in the face, in front of the coaches and everything. Punched him right in the nose.
“She was a tough little one.”
Having lost all their possessions to the tornado, Noah and his mother moved into Raley’s small one-story wood home on Evansville’s West Side. With that, eight family members, plus the boy’s new lovebird, were living in the house.
Donner and his mother found their own house, also on the West Side, a few months later. He moved out at one point but he’s back there now, living with his mother and her second husband and their two teenaged sons. He’s saving money, establishing himself in his new job and dreaming of a better future.
Donner has spent the intervening years trying to find himself and learning to live the new life thrust upon him on the night of Nov. 6, 2005.
That hasn’t been a magical carpet ride, either.
Picking up the pieces
For the first two or three years after the tornado, Donner had no idea of the scale of what had happened.
He knew Emily and Jesse died, but only upon finding some old newspaper articles did he learn that a total of 25 people in Eastbrook and nearby areas lost their lives to the tornado that night.
The jaw-dropping revelation hastened the growing-up process for a boy who was still just a kid.
Donner worked a succession of blue collar jobs in his teenaged years, graduating from F.J. Reitz High School. For a time he thought he wanted to be an accountant or a stockbroker, having taken business classes at Reitz and enjoyed them. He went so far as to study at Purdue University, he said, before realizing he preferred working with his hands and being out among people.
From 2016 until 2020, Donner worked at Meijer supermarket, working in a Meijer convenience store and then in a supermarket as a stocker. He says he helped set up Meijer’s popular North Green River Road location.
Donner, who turns 29 in March, has worked for nearly two years at McMahon Exterminating as a pest control technician in commercial properties, apartments, factories, rental houses and restaurants. He says he loves the job and envisions it as a possible career.
But it’s not like the horrific injuries Noah suffered in the tornado magically healed up and went away.
There were years of physical therapy. Donner has had several reconstructive surgeries on his right ear, which was badly mangled, and on his ankle, which had to be re-broken. He could have had another surgery on the ankle, he says, but a doctor told him there was a high risk he might not be able to walk again if he did.
Donner is partially deaf in each ear, the right worse than the left. His ankle still bothers him. He calls it a “when it rains, kind of deal.” There was a rug burn on his back that was inexplicably stubborn. He’s not quite sure how that happened.
Worst of all, Donner’s motor functions are still a little off, he said. He still sees a neurologist for brain function checks at least twice a year.
The man who flew across Eastbrook Mobile Home Park as a boy and somehow lived to tell about it is philosophical about all that has happened since then.
Emily Donner would be 26 today if she had survived the tornado. Jesse Donner would be 46. All that life. But there has been new life, too.
Donner said his mother remarried after the disaster, and he has now two teenaged stepbrothers who he loves. They wouldn’t be here now if the tornado hadn’t happened, he said.
The path ahead is forward. It has to be.
“I think about what (Emily and Jesse) would they be like today, how my life would be different if they were around,” Noah says. “I mean, it would be nice if they were around, but I wouldn’t change who I am today.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: For one survivor, the 2005 Eastbrook tornado still isn’t over
Reporting by Thomas B. Langhorne, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
