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GRASSY, Mo. — Early in the morning on April 5, still hours before daybreak, Katie Cureton and Dustin Richards were awakened by a flurry of cellphone alerts and relatives calling.

There was a tornado bearing down.

As Cureton, 23, tried to wrestle their two children — Carson, 2, and Kinsleigh, 5 — out of bed and into clothes, Richards, 25, went outside to look at the horizon. It was around 3:30 a.m., still peaceful.

But things changed quickly.

“I knew it was coming,� Richards said. “The lights were flickering.�

The tornado ripped through Bollinger County in southeast Missouri, hopping northeast from this small town along Highway 34, like a top between the hills.

Last week, residents were recovering from the storm, still picking through the pieces of their lives. One landowner said some volunteers had come, but not much help had arrived from the government so far.

Glenallen, especially, was a mess. Tree debris and housing detritus covered the fields and woods — shards of lumber, strips of insulation, sheets of metal. The storm had spared some homes, obliterated others. Five died in one trailer in Glenallen.

“That could have been us,� Richards said from a hospital bed on Wednesday, one week after the storm.

That morning, Richards and his family didn’t have time to make it to a relative’s house for more solid shelter. They decided — very quickly — that they would have to ride out the storm there, in the trailer they rented for $400 a month.

Richards ushered all of them into the tub in the trailer’s windowless bathroom. He wanted to grab a twin mattress to put over the top of them.

Then the trailer started to shake.

Richards turned back, leaned over the tub and wrapped his arms around his family as tightly as he could, trying to hold them together.

An enormous screaming filled the dark room.

“It didn’t sound like a train. It sounded like a jet engine,� Richards said. “I knew the trailer was about to go.�

He felt the trailer lift. Stuff in the bathroom started flying around. At some point, he closed his eyes. He lost track of where they were and where they went.

When he opened his eyes, the trailer was gone, disintegrated.

The tornado had slung it like a board 100 yards away. It crashed into a group of trees on the other side of nearby Highway 34. The upper half — the home itself — was shredded and blown across the field. The storm had bent the trailer’s metal frame in half and thrown it another 100 yards.

At first, Richards wasn’t sure where he was. Nothing looked like home.

Then lightning lit up the field, a wasteland of blown-over trees and root wads.

Cureton was nearby, had a hold of Carson. Richards found Kinsleigh close.

“Everything else was scattered, and we was still together,� Richards said. “It’s hard to believe, ain’t it?�

Seven miles away, in Glenallen, five people in one trailer were killed: Glenn Burcks, 62; Susan Sullivan, 57; Jimmy Skaggs, 37; Michael McCoy, 18; and Destinee Koenig, 16.

David Shipley, 56, said he owned that trailer and provided it rent-free. Destinee, who’d battled cystic fibrosis throughout her life, was his granddaughter. Sullivan was his ex-wife, Skaggs a cousin and the rest seemed like family.

“Something happens to one, it usually affects us all,� Shipley said.

Only the front porch of the trailer remained.

Clarence Cable, 57, and his brother lived in another trailer on the same lot. It was completely destroyed, too.

“I think what saved us was all these trees and we was a little bit lower,� said Cable, who was buried in debris by the tornado.

Other than some clothing strewn about, he said, they lost everything. They didn’t have insurance. Shipley said he didn’t either.

“We lost a great deal,� he said Wednesday, still sifting through the rubble. There, he uncovered a picture of Destinee as a young child.

In Grassy, on the night the tornado hit, relatives followed Richards’ cries for help and found him and his family in the field.

Richards and Cureton wouldn’t let go of their kids.

“They had a death grip on them,� said Timothy Cowell, 38, Cureton’s brother-in-law, who lives nearby. “They were holding them so tight. They wouldn’t even let us have them.�

Carson was in just a diaper. None of them had shoes.

Though they got out alive, the adrenaline soon wore off. Richards’ back was broken in several places. His arms and legs looked like they’d been attacked by a lion. He said Cureton had a serious foot injury and may have suffered a concussion and broken nose. She also had multiple deep lacerations on her arm.

He said the children were treated and released from Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. Carson had bumps and bruises and a hairline fracture in his arm. Kinsleigh was cut across one side of her face, narrowly missing her eye.

“It’s heartbreaking to be thinking about what could be,� said Cureton’s sister, Vanessa Cowell, 32. “They have a ahead of them, but I am glad they are with us.�

Richards, who works at a box factory, isn’t sure how long it will take to heal. But he thinks surviving will make them stronger.

“Keep your family close,� he said. “Don’t take nothing for granted.�