“Well, two years ago like towards the spring when we were in tornado weather,” junior Brady Wagner. “There was I guess a microbursting over Blue Valley middle, and it did a lot of destruction over there.” The tornado started making its way towards Southwest, so the students were instructed to gather into the business rooms.
Brady was in math class texting his mom, who was near Louisburg at the time.
“We were at the bottom of the school so if anything got tore up or anything it’d probably be on top of us,” Wagner said. “I was scared out of my mind.”
Inside the business rooms,  that the students were using for shelter, there wasn’t a very good cell phone connection. Brady was in a middle of a text conversation with his mom, who was near the tornado.
“It was a scary feeling,” he said.
It didn’t take long for Brady to overcome the scare of the tornado that was near Southwest.
“My mom was close to it, and she wasn’t answering her phone or anything,” Wagner said. “That was probably the worst feeling. One second she was texting me saying that she was in a bad situation, I kept trying to ask her what happened, and she didn’t answer. It kind of just gives you that gut-wrenching feeling.”
Brady never received a text back from his mother that day.
“Well, I had track after school, so after that I kind of realized everything was fine,” Wagner said. “I had negative thoughts going through my mind [throughout the day]. I could kind of picture the school getting a call and saying ‘hey your parents were in an accident, you need to go to the hospital,’ which dampened the mood for the whole day.”