JOPLIN, Mo. — Desiree Rodgers’ escape from a deathtrap in the Joplin tornado would be miracle enough if it wasn’t for one other little thing.

Her baby.

Pinned in a squatting position by broken slabs of concrete at the Dillons store after the May 22 tornado, the pregnant Joplin woman felt her life ebbing away.

“You’re going to have one interesting story to tell your baby,” she recalls a firefighter saying to her as they tried to lift debris off her.

A shift in her precarious concrete prison pressed on her so hard she lost the ability to draw breath. Her hips and legs went numb.

“I didn’t think I was going to get out. At that time, I kept thinking, ‘I have to stay alive. I don’t want to go out like this. There are so many things I want to do in life.’”

She wasn’t the only one who was scared.

Her fiancee, Matthew Morris, warned rescuers not to walk on the debris over her head because that put more pressure on her.

“It was dire,” Capt. Jason Martin, of the Carthage Fire Department, said of her predicament.

As desperate as her situation was, though, Rodgers believes she almost certainly would have died had she been at home when the EF-5 twister took out the center of town.

She and Morris lived on the third floor of the Somerset Apartments at 20th Street and Connecticut Avenue, which was destroyed. Those who took shelter in a laundry room of their apartment building were killed, the couple said.

For a woman who had always been afraid of storms, news that weekend that hot and cold air masses were lining up to create a dangerous stormfront kept Rodgers, 24, jittery.

Morris, 31, thought he could distract her with a trip for groceries. They were going to buy something for dinner and some popcorn to settle in later for a Sunday evening movie.

They had just rolled their cart up to the checkout at Dillons, 1402 E. 20th St., when they were informed that a tornado warning had been issued. They were directed to the store’s cooler for shelter.

Morris was nonchalant, he said, having lived in Carthage and Joplin all his life and having seen a number of tornado warnings come and go with no twister.

Inside the cooler, they heard the wind howl and something rattle. More people piled into the makeshift shelter.

“Then my ears popped,” Morris said, “and I knew we had one.”

He held on to Rodgers, 24. She whimpered and other people shouted. The wind and rattling noises were getting louder and, over it, he heard Rodgers telling him over and over she loved him.

“I love you too,” he told her as they felt themselves kneeling down — or being pushed down — under the building’s collapse.

“Then it clicked. This is probably it,” he thought. “I had to come to grips with the fact that this was it.

“There was lots of screaming. I have never heard anything like it.”

When the furious funnel passed, all was dark.

“I assumed we were completely buried,” Morris said. He heard Rodgers say that she felt something was on top of her.

‘I can’t move’

“It’s going to be OK,” he told her, trying to assure her they would all make their way out from under the wreckage.

“She said ,‘No. I can’t move.’ And she completely lost it,” he said. Then he realized she was literally pinned down.

As daylight peeked through the twisted remains of the store, Morris could see that Rodgers was bearing the brunt of the pressure.

She had learned about six weeks earlier that she was pregnant.

When he saw her awkward position under the weight of the collapsed store walls, “I was thinking about the baby but I wasn’t going to say that to her,” Morris said. “I wanted her thinking of her life.”

She was stuck for about a half hour until, on the street outside, a woman who had escaped the wreckage flagged down a Carthage fire crew.

“We were one of the first trucks to arrive in Joplin,” after a call for mutual aid went out, said Martin.

Franklin Technical School, west of the Dillons store, was burning and they were dispatched to fight that fire. When they got in front of Dillons, they had to stop for downed power lines.

“We were stopped there and a lady came running out at us,” saying a woman was trapped.

“We couldn’t get to the fire so we said we are going to do what we can do and we got her out,” Martin said. “She wouldn’t have lived much longer. She couldn’t breathe because of the amount of weight on her.”

Rodgers told the rescuers she was pregnant.

Martin said it was a difficult rescue because the jack used to lift the rubble, called a portable ram, was nearly overburdened. Every step the firefighters took in the debris pushed harder on Rodgers.

“I would say she had well over a ton on her back,” Martin said. “Our machines almost wouldn’t lift it.” The jack stalled once, straining against the weight, and then moved again.

“It lifted it enough she could breathe,” Martin said, and though it had raised the pile only about two inches, that was enough for the firefighters to quickly pull her out.

Rodgers was taken to a local hospital where she said she was kept overnight and dismissed the next day. She had been bleeding and says she thought she was told she was having a miscarriage. That was particularly sad for the couple, they said, because she had been pregnant six months earlier and miscarried.

Her parents, Martin and Darlene Porter, took her and Morris home with them to Parsons, Kan., but Desiree was sick, unable to stand or walk and had bloody urine. She told her mother she would like to have a second opinion and they took her to Labette Health, the hospital in Parsons.

There she was diagnosed with crush injuries to her muscles and kidneys.

Ultrasound

During her tests, an ultrasound was done and the technologist asked her father, “How would you like to be a Granddad?”

The baby was alive.

Rodgers spent several days in the hospital and then went home with a walker and outpatient physical therapy. She is now able to walk short distances and is not in as much pain.

On Thursday, she and Morris went to the hospital for another ultrasound. The baby was curled up tight, keeping its gender to itself, but Lori Ferguson, the registered diagnostic sonographer, worked until she could give the couple the news.

“It’s a boy,” Morris said of the test results.

The expected delivery date is Jan. 6. The couple have nicknamed their small wonder “Miracle Baby.”

“I’m very excited,” said Rodgers, “because of the fact that I still have ‘Miracle Baby’ and I thought I had lost the baby.”

She said people have suggested she give the baby a name that symbolizes their ordeal, something like Dillon or Wendy, she said.

“He will now be known as Leo. Leo is a strong name and you think of a lion.”





Rescuers

Those who extricated Desiree Rodgers from the tornado debris were Capt. Jason Martin, Lt. Ryan Huntley, Davis Martin and Josh Estes of the Carthage Fire Department.