“It’s just a rubble now, there’s nothing left,” said Suzanne Flint, of Mayfield, Kentucky, pointing to her restaurant, which has been in her family for 75 years, while speaking to CNN’s John Berman.
“It is devastating now. Like I said, my whole family has worked there sometime or another. Me, my mother, brother, my grandparents, my aunt — everybody has worked there at one time or another, and most of them are gone, so those were really the only memories we had left of them,” Flint told Berman.
Flint’s husband, Wayne Flint, was at a basketball game, 20 minutes away from the restaurant, when the tornado hit Friday. He described his decision to drive back home instead of taking shelter.
“They had told us everybody needed to take cover while we were at the ball gym. Well, I had the bright idea we’re going back home because we had family here. And was that a mistake. I watched 18 wheelers flip over in front of me and my truck picked up off the ground a couple times. We got back here and once I got to her, we started our way up here,” Wayne said.
“This is just terrible, this is just devastating to this whole place, you know, they’re all good people here, everybody is good people and I’m going to try to hurry up and get this restaurant back up because I feel like this will give people hope, you know,” Wayne, who’s owns a construction business,” Wayne, who owns a construction company, said.
“If I can stand some two-by-fours up and start building some walls and people see that we’re not done, you know, we’re going to go back. And I’m hoping that is what happens,” he said.
For now, the Flints are still processing what happened.
“It is surreal to me right now, I guess. I don’t guess it’s hit me yet. I guess we’re just going like machines,” Suzanne said.
She adds, that their family still plans to celebrate Christmas. “We’ll have Christmas one way or another. We got grandkids,” she said.