A veteran firefighter and a four-year-old girl are among the victims of Hurricane Helene.
The deadly storm slammed into the southeastern U.S. on Thursday night as a Category 4 in Florida’s Big Bend region around 11:10 p.m EST. Rescue efforts are continuing throughout the region as the death toll has now risen to 44 with 19 of those alone in South Carolina.
Early Friday morning in Georgia, Vernon Leon Davis was setting up barricades along with other firefighters near where a live power line had fallen, Blackshear Police Chief Christopher Wright said in an interview. Davis got in his truck to as the began to intensify and a tree fell on his car killing him, according to Wright. Davis, was a 30-year veteran of the Blackshear Fire Department, mostly on a voluntary basis
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Wright said to NBC News of Davis saying he was “one of the greatest folks that Blackshear had. We’re all better for having known, he would do anything for anybody. him,”
According to Davis’s brother James Davis, he had texted his brother on Thursday in group chat with other family members before Helene had made landfall. He asked if they were ready for Helene and he responded saying they were as ready as they could be. He said that he had prepared his generator to power his home. His wife Shirley stayed home while Davis went out and cut trees near people home and helped put down sand bags.
“That was my last communication with him,” Davis said Friday afternoon.
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Davis’s sister Rellina Davis Lester said that she took some solace in the fact that her brother died trying to help other people.
“It’s hard, but he was doing what he loved and that was his calling in life,” she said.
In Catawba County, North Carolina, a four-year-old girl named Luna Jade Gaddis died when two families’ became involved ina. car crash in hazardous conditions.
Luna’s grandmother, Elizabeth Gaddis, described her granddaughter as a “gift from God” who gave the best hugs and “could make the room light up when she walked in.”
“Her smile was infectious, her laugh was contagious and more times than not she would make you question who was right and who was wrong,” Gaddis wrote in a statement she shared exclusively with NBC News.
