“That tornado took every bit of security I had”: Life after the Holdenville tornado

(OKMULGEE, Okla.) After being caught in a deadly tornado one year ago, Candace Harjo says her daughter Ryleigh cannot feel raindrops on her skin without being triggered. 

“The rain touches her skin, it gives her cringes,” Candace said. “It will completely set her off, or she bawls her eyes out. If she knows it's going to rain, she won't leave the house. Thunder and lightning completely freaks her out. She says it's the shaking, because she said it feels like the house is shaking, and she remembers that the most.” 

According to the National Weather Service, at least 39 tornadoes touched down from April 27 to April 28, 2024. 35 of them were in Oklahoma. 

Four lives were lost during the outbreak, including a 4-month-old baby in Holdenville. The other Holdenville death was Ryleigh’s uncle, Jimmy “Jay” Johnson, who lived with them. 

Candace’s home was destroyed by the EF-3 tornado, which threw Johnson, Ryleigh, and Candace’s son Josh 75 feet as the house was torn apart. 

Candace was staying with her husband Tim and her five youngest children at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, at the time. Tim had been receiving treatment for Stage Four kidney cancer, which he had been battling for four and a half years.

Candace said after a year and half of testing at OU in Oklahoma, they were forced to transfer down to Texas due to health insurance and treatment delays. 

“When we got to MD Anderson, we had found out that Tim's cancer had eaten through outside of the femur bone,” Candace said. “It had broken his leg in many places. It had gone to his brain. All the lymph nodes in his chest, part of the other kidney, and basically had gone through most of his body already.” 

“It had gone through his bone marrow, and by the last year had happened, it had gone through his shoulders, his arms, his arm was broken just by moving him.” 

A Mother's Worst Fears

Candace was talking on the phone with Ryleigh, who was 14 years old at the time, when the storms rolled through. 

“Mom, she says, ‘I don't think we're going to be okay this time. I don't think this is right’,” Candace recalled. “She's like, ‘Something's not right.’ And my brother-in-law had Ryleigh laid down underneath my bed and him and Josh. Josh, I think, was under a table, is what he said. And I don't know where Jay was. He was kind of trying to make sure everybody was okay. And the storm came over on top of them.”

“The phone call dropped. I called them back a couple times and couldn't get through to them. And I called James and said, James, I said, I don't think the kids are going to be okay.” 

Candace’s friend James, Tim and Jay’s cousin, was taking cover in a tornado shelter in nearby Okemah when it happened. 

“There's more or less like a direct hit when you see the tornado path, the path of destruction, and it just comes around and it goes right through where the house was at,” James said. “And then you can see through the trees where it continued its path, but it was level. There was nothing. Nothing there left anymore.” 

Candace’s family was thrown in opposite directions. She said Ryleigh landed under a hide-a-bed couch and Jay had landed on top of the couch. Josh, who was 24 years old at the time, tried to perform CPR on Jay before pulling the couch off of Ryleigh.

“My husband had worked for the City of Wewoka,” Candace said. “And when I couldn't get to Holdenville emergency crews, I called Mark Mosley. He was the city manager. And Mark sent a crew to my house. So, he wasn't even from our town, he's from the next town over and he sent somebody to the house and that was how they were able to get somebody to the kids.” 

James arrived shortly after. 

“The kids were already gone,” James said. “They had taken them to the hospitals and I couldn't go out there to see Jay because they wanted the medical examiner to have to be there first to do their investigation and take pictures and things like that. So I stayed there and waited there the rest of that evening until the morning, till the medical examiner got there so I can identify the body.” 

Injuries and Trauma

Muscogee Lighthorse Tribal Police had taken Josh to Holdenville General Hospital. His neck and back had been compressed, had received numerous lacerations and all of his ribs were broken. 

Ryleigh, in a coma from her injuries, was taken by ambulance to Oklahoma City. 

“She had a lot of brain swelling,” Candace said. “She broke every bone in her body, basically, they said, except for her left arm and her left leg. She broke her pelvis. All of her ribs. She had fractured vertebrae in her neck and in her back. Her right arm. I have a picture of her arm from when it happened, where her arm comes out and this part looks like a road, like a mountain, and comes down. And then her leg. She has a rod from her hip to her knee with screws here. She has two plates in this arm. She has plates here on the front and back of both this arm or this calf. Her ankle. She lost vision in her left eye. And thankfully, that's starting to come back. There's still a little scarring in there, but it's coming back. She had a severe concussion. That has given her some issues, but mostly it's the PTSD part of it.” 

Grace Ballard is a licensed clinical social worker, somatic experiencing practitioner and the director and owner of Foundations Behavioral Health. Located in Claremore, a majority of Foundations clients are Indigenous. 

Ballard said they have had an influx of clients with severe weather-related trauma following the tornado last Memorial Day in Claremore, including family members of some of those who were killed in their grant program. 

“You can overcome your PTSD,” Ballard said. “It's not a life sentence. You can slowly train your body and mind to realize that the threat is in the past. You're safe today, you're safe in the now, but this takes a little practice and may be best achieved by working with a professional who is trained in treated PTSD.” 

Ballard said the technique they teach their clients to manage symptoms during severe weather is called “resourcing”, which is exercised after the person has gone to a safe place to protect themselves. 

“Resourcing can be similar to what most people are somewhat familiar with as "grounding", but it doesn't necessarily always bring one back to the present moment like grounding does from Mindfulness,” Ballard said. “Resourcing is pairing a current positive self-soothing activity or object like a weighted blanket, soothing self-hold, lucky rock, or imagery that is calming or pleasant. There can also be imagery of people or places and individual finds empowering, soothing, or protective, like a power animal, loved one, spirit, or place in nature. We refer to these as inner resources/resourcing.”

Ballard said they instruct traumatized individuals to practice resourcing while calm so that it's easier to bring up when triggered. 

“I tell all my clients to practice resourcing daily,” Ballard said. “We also pair it with noticing symptoms of distress and calm in their bodies before and after practicing resourcing. This step is very important as it can create a new neurofeedback loop in the mind and the body. We help our clients with self-regulation skills as well that directly work on calming or regulation of their nervous systems, like whistle breathing, box breathing, and soothing self-containment holds.” 

Candace said Ryleigh, who is Seminole, has pushed back on counseling. 

For now, she has found healing in dancing and attending ceremony with family like James, who is Muscogee and Seminole. But she will have surgery again soon to remove some of her hardware.

“She stomp dances and last year even though she was hurt, she still went out and danced after they gave her the clear,” Candace said. “And some of the screws she's worked out, so when you rub her leg, they, like, stick up. So they're gonna take those out. They're gonna take them out and take out the plates. She's gonna keep the rod in her femur. Some of that is sentimental more than needing it, but because that was where my husband's cancer was first diagnosed when we got to MD Anderson, he had the same rod in that same leg. So for her, it's more a sentimental connection thing, I think, more than her needing it.” 

Tim died six weeks after the Holdenville tornado. 

Rebuilding Life

Candance said she, Tim, Jay and James were all best friends, and the closest family she had aside from her children. Now, so soon after losing her home and family, she needed to find out how she was going to support six kids under 18 on her own. As well as continuing to be there for her other three children who were over 18.

“I had no clue, no direction,” Candace said. “No help. No help. I was lost. I didn't know what I was going to do. Literally that tornado took every bit of security I had. And that was our home, that was everything. And then that house was paid off. Like I didn't have any bills. So when Tim passed away, or if Tim had passed away and I was able to stay there, I would have been in a different situation than going out now and having to learn how to pay rent and your car payments and utilities and everything that, all of a sudden, I am assigned with and taking care of seven kids. Josh can't work because of his injuries still and still fighting with, trying to get help with him.”

Knowing she needed to do something, Candace turned to James, who had 20 years' experience in tree trimming, tree removal, and running chainsaws for the majority of his life.

Together, they founded C and J’s Roll Offs and Debris Removal in September 2024.

James is the owner and operator. 

“We do one job, go buy a saw, do another job and get more,” James said. “Just start adding stuff up and fitting it together. Of course, trying to keep the trailer paid and truck paid and keep our bills paid.”

“Going to all the business expos, things like that. We've been to every one of them they've put on. We learn, we meet new people every time. And that helps out a lot too. Really, it's just to be financially stable, to get ourselves there. We're still working on that part of it, but that's a part of business. Most important part is just not just throwing in the towel whenever it gets rough. Sometimes it's just, we'll get it on the next job, you know.” 

As he navigates running a business, James said it is also important for C and J to give back to their local communities, aided by their own lived experiences of tragedy and loss. 

“Like I said, I've been in the tree industry for a long time,” James said. “And we've seen the tornadoes in Seminole, Oklahoma. But you also see all these contractors that just come in and flood the whole neighborhoods. We don't want to be coming in and say, hey, we could do this for this amount of money. I just want to come in and help get things cleared up, cleaned up without no charge or nothing. Just to help out, kind of the community deal, just to help.” 

“When it's close to home, your family and things like that, it gets rough. But, you know, you try to maintain yourself and your mental status too. Not letting it try to overwhelm your mind because those images, they don't go away. You know, seeing Jimmy out there that night, that never goes away.” 

Candace said helping has also been healing. 

“Being able to help people that were in our situation,” Candace said. “Being able to help people that just had their life completely uprooted. I mean, because in a flash of a minute everything is gone. You don't have time to process anything. You're just thrown in. I mean literally the tornado picks up everything and throws it one way and you're pretty much picked up, thrown in another direction trying to figure out how to put all the pieces back together. And even a year later, I'm still trying to figure it out.” 

To contact C and J Roll Offs and Debris Removal, visit https://candjok.com/