Hugo Parra felt God had led him to Valley View when an EF-2 tornado struck the gas station he and his family were sheltering in.
Parra, 50, and his family had left their home in Farmers Branch around 9 p.m. Saturday to party with relatives in Oklahoma City over the Memorial Day weekend.
Gusts of wind whipped against his Ford Taurus, he recalled. Lightning flashes covered the sky as he and his family approached Denton. Parra’s phone rang. His mother was calling to tell him there was a tornado warning.
On guard now, Parra kept driving. He passed by a Love’s Travel Stop. By a Chevron station in Sanger. He said he could feel the intensity of the wind growing. Suddenly, he had mental images of his sedan being flung into the air. He had to stop.
The family arrived at the Shell gas station in Valley View close to 9:45 p.m. They stood outside and waited near the benches. Parra had a radar app he had been using to track the wind. At first, it looked like the storm would stay limited to areas around Gainesville.
“But everything was worse,” Parra said.
Preliminary National Weather Service reports showed wind speeds reached up to 135 mph in the Valley View area. Inside the gas station, people peered out the windows. The cashiers asked people to move closer to food counters.
Parra thought that was a bad idea.
“Move to the bathrooms!” he screamed and rushed his family into the men’s restroom. The cashier followed suit and urged people to move toward the restrooms.
Then the power went off.
Over 50 people scrambled toward the men’s and women’s restrooms and some stayed out near the doors in the hallway, Parra recalled. Parra heard people cry. Many were praying. In front of him, the windows broke and aisles of food and other products flew. His wife held him close. She said she was afraid.
“I was feeling that I need to be strong,” Parra said, “to protect everybody.”
They saw the winds tear off the roof. Parra recalled seeing debris from a building fly past the broken windows. If the tornado lasted another 15 seconds, he said, he wasn’t sure if they’d survive.
The tornado “was moving everything,” Parra said.
Hugo’s wife, Cristina Chavez Parra, 48, said in an interview she was scared when the tornado hit the gas station. She recalled praying during the onslaught. “I was OK when I saw my sons and my daughter” were OK after the tornado passed, she said.
The ordeal lasted 10 minutes, but Parra said it felt like an eternity. Once the winds died down, Parra and his oldest son surveyed what was left of the gas station. They couldn’t believe their eyes. The area near the food counter was ripped apart.
Parra’s Ford Taurus was mangled.
Firefighters and police arrived 20 minutes later. One of them walked up to Parra.
“Were you inside?” Parra recalled the firefighter asking him.
“Yes,” he said.
The firefighter shook his head and said, “You got lucky.”
With the Taurus destroyed, his daughter Cristal Parra, who lives in Fort Worth, had to pick the family up and bring them back to Farmers Branch. But Parra, who is a truck driver, will have to figure out a way to get to work in Grand Prairie.
Meanwhile, Cristal has started a GoFundMe page to help the family recover.
But Parra doesn’t care. He is glad his family survived the tornado.
Most of the people who followed Parra into the restroom made it out with scratches and bumps. Sunday went by in a blur. He watched news reports and images of what his family had escaped.
“Today,” Parra said, “I sat down thinking, ‘Why did you stop? Why did you stop there?’”
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think maybe God put me in that place to take everybody to the restroom.”
