Among stories of valor emerging from the rubble in Moore, Okla., many involve educators who could teach us a thing or two about lifesaving.
As Monday's killer tornado rumbled toward Briarwood Elementary School, Paula Fauble and three other teachers wedged 18 students into a hallway between bathrooms, area news outlet KOCO reported. The teachers then placed pillows on the kids and lay on top of them to form a shield.
As the roof tore off, a car fell from the sky like a missile, landing just 20 feet from where the group was huddled. "The kids were so great, so quiet," Fauble, whose nearby home was destroyed, told the station in the video above. "The only thing you could hear was us adults praying."
Miraculously, everyone survived at Briarwood.
Fauble, of course, wasn't the only teacher to show courage in the crisis.
A mile away, at Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children died, teacher Anna Canaday also used her body to protect pupils from the twister. She and colleague Jessica Simonds were pinned to the ground by a black Ford that landed on them, but the car deflected the building's falling roof.
“I’m pretty banged up, but nothing’s broken,” she told the Daily Beast.
Soon after the tornado hit, teacher LaDonna Cobb's bloodied face became one of the iconic images of the disaster after she, too, personally shielded kids in a classroom at Briarwood and came terrifyingly close to being sucked skyward. She clung to the children as the funnel roared through.
“I knew if I was taken all the babies under me would be gone too," she said to outlets.
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