As Tropical Storm Isaias pounded Morris County Tuesday afternoon, Greg Ramirez felt his anxiety creeping up.
“Something came over me, I would say 30 minutes before everything happened, I just felt this uneasiness,” Ramirez, of Wharton, told NJ Advance Media. “I couldn’t shake this feeling that something kept telling me, prepare for something, something is coming.”
He asked his fiancée, Maria Jaramillo Mora, and his two children, 9-year-old Jayden and 7-year-old Mia, to come downstairs. He began to gather food, water and clothing in the basement.
It was around 12:30 p.m., the middle of the day.
Then, suddenly, darkness.
“Everything just went black,” Ramirez said. “Dark. Dust everywhere.”
Tropical Storm Isaias knocked over a tree into the Ramirez family’s Baker Street home in Wharton.Courtesy of Greg Ramirez
A towering tree, uprooted by the storm, had crushed his two-story home on Baker Street, knocking out the power and surrounding Ramirez and his children in a flurry of debris.
The father acted quickly, clutching Jayden in his arms and bringing him to the kitchen where he told him to run outside. Jayden instead stood frozen, hysterical, making it difficult for Ramirez to locate Mia over the sound of his screams.
As he searched for his daughter in the dark, he tried to outstretch his body, over the area where he thought Mia might have laid. He feared the ceiling would cave in; the tree had torn through the side and front of the house.
“At that moment, I just thought the worst,” Ramirez said. “This fear came in my heart … I told God, ‘take everything from me, take the house, take my things … but help me find my daughter and I’ll be a happy man.’ A second later, I see her little hand grab my hand.”
Mia reached out, clasped her father’s hand and he yanked her out from the debris where she was partially buried. He ran the kids outside and told them to stay put. Though they tried to run back in the house with him, a neighbor had rushed to their backyard to check on them.
Ramirez sprinted back into the house for his fiancée, who had gone upstairs take a shower five minutes before the tree fell. She was scrambling to grab her clothes when Ramirez opened the bathroom door. She stopped in her tracks, surveying the damage in the hallway.
He helped her get dressed and walk outside, grabbing his phone and wallet on the way out.
By the time police and an ambulance arrived, Ramirez’s family were safely outside with only a few injuries: Mia was lightly scratched with a bruise on her back from being yanked out of the rubble.
Four days later, Ramirez and his family are safe. But what comes next?
The family spent two nights after the storm at Mora’s father’s house, letting the kids sleep in a bed while the adults slept atop comforters on the floor. Now, they are in a hotel, before likely relocating to Ramirez’s mother’s home.
They had been renting the house, but Ramirez said that after living in apartments, having a yard and two stories to call their own made the Baker Street house feel like their first real home.
“Our dream is to provide the kids with their own house, so we were saving but to us that was our home,” Ramirez said. “Even the landlord can tell you, we put so much love into that property. Little by little we would add things to it and took so much pride in it.”
Mora echoed her fiancé‘s sentiment on Facebook.
“We lost the place that we were renting for the past 2.5 years, our HOME … although we did not own it we loved it so much and we built so many beautiful memories, ones that we will hold on to for our entire life,” she wrote on Facebook.
Despite the ordeal, Ramirez has still been able to find blessings in the pain his family has suffered.
Mora had broken her arm exactly a month before the storm, putting her out of work and on disability. If she had been working in her home office when the tree fell, Ramirez knows their fate would have been much different.
Since the storm, their family, neighbors and community have reached out with an outpouring of support.
Neighbors all offered the family a place to stay and provided them with supermarket gift cards.
“I have so much thankfulness to my neighbors, they were like family that day, just hovering over us, making sure we had everything we needed,” Ramirez said.
The following day, Ramirez’s neighbor placed her children along with Jayden outside the house to collect donations while people strolled by to take pictures of the destruction. The kids raised a few thousand dollars, and Mora’s cousin set up a GoFundMe for them which has already seen more than $10,000 in donations.
“All those words of positivity that we’re hearing from everyone, they’re just keeping our morale high,” Ramirez said. “So we just want to thank everyone for that.”
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