Funeral services will be Saturday for Shirley Taylor Thomas, 55, who died Sunday evening of injuries sustained when a section of a large oak tree fell onto her house in Glendora.
Tallahatchie County Coroner Ginger Meriwether said Mrs. Thomas died of “multiple trauma.”
The wife of Glendora Mayor Johnny B. Thomas, Mrs. Thomas was an at-large alderwoman on the Glendora Board of Aldermen and a longtime radio dispatcher for the Tallahatchie County Sheriff’s Office.
Meriwether described the incident at the couple’s 19 Williams Ave. wood-frame home as “weather related.”
The county was under a severe thunderstorm warning, and high winds were pushing through the area at the time the tree fell, shortly before 6 p.m.
A National Weather Service bulletin issued a half-hour earlier had warned that 70 mph wind gusts were possible with some local storms.
“We were watching TV in the bedroom when the wind picked up,” Mayor Thomas said Tuesday. “It happened so fast, so swiftly, we hardly had time to say anything.”
He noted that he and his wife jumped out of bed and crouched nearby, on separate sides of the bedroom.
When the tree fell, it ripped through the roof and ceiling and crashed through a wall, the mayor explained.
Rescue workers used chain saws to cut through the rubble and reach Mrs. Thomas. She was placed into an ambulance to be transported to the Clarksdale hospital, but paramedics lost her pulse near Webb, according to Meriwether, who said Mrs. Thomas was pronounced dead at 7:40 p.m.
The mayor, who said he may have been “knocked out” for a short while, was taken by private vehicle to the Clarksdale hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries and released.
He said he and his wife had been married for “13 years and 28 days.”
The mayor said Saturday’s funeral services for Mrs. Thomas will begin at 1 p.m. at Persimmon Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Enid. Clark-Williams Funeral Home of Grenada is in charge of arrangements.
Mrs. Thomas had worked as a radio dispatcher for the sheriff’s office since October 2003. In fact, noted Tallahatchie County Sheriff William Brewer, she had just finished her latest shift at 3 p.m. Sunday.
The sheriff spoke in glowing terms of the Oakland native, Mrs. Thomas, who was about to finish her first term on the Glendora Board of Aldermen and was seeking election to a second in this year’s municipal elections.
“I’ve been knowing her and her family all my life. We all grew up within three or four miles of each other. We went to school together,” Brewer said. “She was a good girl, a dependable employee and had a big heart.”
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Thad Roberts, director of the Tallahatchie County Emergency Management Agency, said the Thomas home was the only one reported to have been damaged in the Glendora area Sunday, but he said an old county road department shop near Webb had some roof damage when sheets of tin were ripped off.
Sunday night’s storms were part of the second round of severe weather to pound Tallahatchie County within a matter of days.
On the night of Wednesday, March 29, storms accompanied by strong winds whipped through the area, downing trees in every supervisor’s district in the county and causing scattered power outages, Roberts noted.
Schools in the West Tallahatchie School District were dismissed Thursday because they had no electricity.
Sumner Town Clerk Toni Clark said a large fallen tree on Wayne Street knocked down power lines and left much of that town in the dark. She said Sumner Town Hall was running on generator power Thursday morning.
Numerous homes and other structures throughout the county sustained roof and other damage due to the midweek storms.
The roof of ELOHIM Child Care and Learning Center on South Laura Street in Webb was gashed by fallen tree limbs.
Roberts said there were no reports of injuries from the March 29 weather.
