NEWPORT NEWS -- Kyle O'Brien was on his sofa Thursday morning, waiting to find out if Warwick High School would be closed due to the coastal storm that began pounding away at Hampton Roads a day earlier. The 17-year-old heard a cracking outside, realized he was in trouble, and jumped off the sofa, getting to the floor just before a tree weighing an estimated two tons crashed down on his family's mobile home, splitting it in two, pinning O'Brien.
"If he had been sitting on or laying on that couch instead of getting up like he did," says O'Brien's grandmother, Kathy Williams, "it would have probably sliced him in half, because when the tree went down, the whole entire couch just split in half."
O'Brien lay under its weight for about two-and-a-half hours, as firefighters worked to free him. Paramedics ran IVs. Crews used a crane to lift the tree just enough so emergency workers could get to O'Brien and pull him out.
"He thought he was, basically, gonna die," cousin Kathie Clouser says.
"From the waist up, he's doing well," Williams tells 13News. "His right leg from the knee down, he has no feeling at all. The left leg is damaged, but he says it's constantly tingling, so that means it is trying to get better."
Doctors did a series of tests, but all they can tell the family is that O'Brien has a lot of nerve damage.
"We don't know if he's gonna walk again. I think that's the saddest part. I mean, he's 17."
"Knocked the wall on top of me, and, then, I punched the wall to get out," explains Heidie O'Brien who was in her bedroom when the tree crashed into the mobile home. Her other brother, Leo, was in the room he shares with O'Brien, and had an escape similar to Heidie's.
"I hear Kyle screaming, 'Help me! Help me!'" she recalls. "I knew he was under something, but I didn't know it was the tree. Like, my heart just dropped."
"Everything seemed like it was in slow motion," Williams remembers. "You could see people moving. You could hear my daughter crying, telling me, 'Mom, they can't get him out! They can't get him out!' The other two children were hysterical."
The damage to the home is so severe, the family cannot live in it or repair it. Relatives plan to set up a recovery fund, but the primary focus is O'Brien's recovery.
"He is our first boy -- grandson. We have 14 grandchildren, and he's always held a special place in my heart, of course," says Williams. "If we can keep his spirits up, yeah, I think he'll do fine. I think he'll do fine. It's just getting him there."
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