Two adult children are waiting to hear if their mother survived being swept away by Hurricane Helene while protecting her home in North Carolina.
Kim Ashby reached out to her children, Chris and Jessica Meidinger, on Thursday to tell them she and her husband, Rod, who built the family's new mountain home, had safely made it to Elk Park, North Carolina. According to ABC11, the couple didn't think there would be much damage since they intentionally built the house "a dozen feet higher than the highest past flood," but they wanted to be around in case anything happened.
When the storm hit, Kim's children didn't know what happened to her until a neighbor told them they saw their mother's house floating down the river and later sent a picture of it.
Shortly after, Kim's husband reached out, telling her children that the couple had tried to get to higher ground when the Category 4 storm hit Friday, but "it was already too late." The couple and their three dogs were on a mattress together in the house until it hit a river bank and fell apart.
Rod and Kim clung to one another until they hit a tree.
"That's what split them apart, and he was not able to hold on to her. There was, I guess, a tree hanging down and he was able to grab onto that and get himself out of the water, and he was able to crawl up the mountain to a neighbor's house where he was safe, but before doing that, he went up and down the river and they couldn't find her," Jessica told ABC11. "He's been searching ever since."
Kim and the family's three dogs have now been missing for four days.
"Please keep praying. Please keep thinking, but please don't reach out unless you have something that's helpful that you know to be true," Jessica pleaded.
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