VILONIA — Suzanne Wassom came back to Vilonia in December and visited the concrete slab that used to be the site of her family’s home before a tornado tore it apart and took her husband’s life.
“I went out there by myself and just sat out there, and it was peaceful,” Wassom said. “I wasn’t sad out there; it wasn’t depressing like when you go to the cemetery. At my property, it felt like memories, good memories. I feel like that’s where Dan is to me when I go to Arkansas.”
Her husband, Master Sgt. Daniel Wassom II, died April 27, 2014, protecting their then-5-year-old daughter, Lorelai. Suzanne covered their older daughter, Sydney, 7. Her husband was 31.
She packed the girls and the things they salvaged from the tornado and moved to Fidalgo Island in Washington state, where she has a sister. Wassom said she and her family visited her sister for years, and they talked about retiring there someday. Now, Wassom is a single parent.
“I didn’t feel like we’d be able to heal here,” Wassom said of Vilonia.
She donated their lot in Parkwood Meadows to the city of Vilonia, and it will become a park in memory of her husband and the city’s seven other tornado victims.
Mayor James Firestone said the corner lot on Aspen Creek Drive is perfect for a park.
“It couldn’t be a better location. We’re going to do a memorial park. We’re actually going to do a playground for the kids, a bench, a little sitting area and a plaque,” Firestone said. “We want a place where parents can come let their kids play; plant some trees, make it really nice — make it something the whole subdivision can be proud of.”
Wassom said that before the tornado, lots of children were in the subdivision, and they often played at her home.
Her husband was always welcoming to new people, she said.
“There was nothing shy about him,” Wassom said, laughing. “He was the type in the neighborhood, if someone new moved in, he would grab one of the girl’s scooters and go down and say hi to them and offer to help them move in.”
The couple met at a church dance in Jacksonville, she said. He was born in Jacksonville and graduated from Cabot High School; she grew up in Texas. They were married
almost 9 1/2 years and lived in Jacksonville before moving to Vilonia.
“He was in the military, but we chose Vilonia because of the school district,” she said. “That was going to be where we were going to raise [the girls].”
The couple found the home at 28 Aspen Creek Drive when it was under construction, so they got to make it their own.
He served for 12 years in the Arkansas Air National Guard’s 189th Airlift Wing, where he was a full-time C130 loadmaster, instructor and evaluator. He had graduated from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway with a hospital-administration degree, but he decided not to pursue that, she said.
“He just loved the family that he had built with all of his co-workers,” Wassom said. He traveled as an instructor, and he had friends all over the world.
Dan, as she called him, also was a homebody, she said. “He loved being home and spending time with the girls,” Wassom said. “He was very active with the girls. They did sports and gymnastics. Anything at school, any awards programs — he was there. If they had a class party, he was there. He was just a very involved dad.”
Her favorite memories of him are the days their daughters were born, “because he was such a happy dad; he was in there with me.”
That Sunday when the tornado tore through their area of Arkansas, all four members of the family were home, she said.
“We really didn’t know what was going on; we weren’t TV watchers. We didn’t know till someone texted me and let me know a tornado was headed to Conway,” Wassom said. “Living in Arkansas so long, you hear tornado sirens so much, you just go in the hallway. It never even crossed our minds to go to a tornado shelter.”
They grabbed blankets and pillows and went to the hallway in the central part of their house, she said.
The girls were scared. “I had taken a picture of them and put it on Facebook moments before the tornado came,” she said. “I almost took a picture of Dan because he was sitting on a bean bag playing on his phone. I chose not to take a picture of him.” It would have been the last one.
“My oldest had fallen asleep in the hall, so I let her sleep until I heard the tornado,” Wassom said.
When they heard the tornado coming, Wassom recalled that she and her husband looked at each other in disbelief.
“I was over Sydney with a bean bag. She was underneath me; I was crouched over her,” she said. The tornado ripped the bean bag out of her hands.
“Dan had a bean bag and was crouched over Lorelai.” Wassom said she and her husband were touching shoulders.
“It was very loud. We were getting pounded; we were screaming. I kept screaming, “I love you.’ I thought we were all dead and didn’t want my kids not to hear me tell them I loved them.”
In a couple of minutes, it was over.
“I still had Sydney. We hadn’t moved, but I couldn’t find Lorelai and Dan, so I started screaming for them,” Wassom said.
She saw movement under some blankets nearby, and it was Lorelai. But Dan was missing.
Wassom took the girls outside and put them in a neighbor’s house that was partially standing. “It was raining, and it was dark,” she said.
She went back in the house to look for her husband.
“I found him, and he was not far from where I was. He was just covered in stuff,” Wassom said.
She knew he was dead.
“It was obvious,” she said. “He had an extremely peaceful look on his face. His head was very limp, and at the time, I didn’t know the vertebrae in the back of his neck had been ripped out,” she said. At the time, she thought he was wounded on the back of his head. “He was slumped over forward, and it was dark, and I couldn’t really see. He was sitting up because we were kneeling down over our girls. I laid him back, and that’s when I knew he was gone.”
In addition to his neck injury, Wassom said, her husband had a piece of wood impaled in his chest.
“Because I had my head down, I have no idea when he was killed, how he was killed,” Wassom said. People have speculated, but there is no way to know, she said.
“With all that stuff flying around, there’s no telling what actually killed him. I had a big gash across the back of my head,” she said.
Wassom said she was hysterical after the tornado went over, but she summoned her strength.
“I think I went into mother-bear mode,” she said. “I called my sister in Washington — why I called my sister in Washington, I have no clue. She was the first person who popped in my head.” Her sister called her in-laws, Dan and Pamela Wassom of Cabot.
“When they showed up, [Pamela] stayed with the girls, and I and my father-in-law went and sat with Dan’s body,” Wassom said. The girls never saw their daddy; they found out that he had died while they were waiting for a ride to the hospital.
Wassom said she didn’t realize the extent of Lorelai’s injuries.
“She had wood go through her right shoulder, so she had a fractured shoulder with wood in it,” Wassom said. Lorelai also lost most of one toe and had major cuts and bruises. She underwent surgery at Arkansas Children’s Hospital; Sydney had cuts and scrapes.
Wassom had a concussion, and for a week she had to write everything down or have someone with her because she could’t remember things, she said.
Their three animals, a cat and two dogs, survived — although one dog was found wandering a month later about a mile from their neighborhood. Some jewelry, a few photo albums, toys and clothes were salvaged, Wassom said.
Their sense of security was gone, though.
The girls suffered from “pretty bad” post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. They got upset every time it rained or the wind blew hard.
“Dealing with Arkansas weather in the spring, that’s what triggered us to move. I wasn’t going to put them through that. … I’m not going to live my life in a tornado shelter,” she said.
The island the family lives on is near Anacortes, Washington. She said that because of the geography, the weather is good. Since they moved in July, they’ve had only a couple of short thunderstorms.
At first, she tried to sell their lot in Vilonia, but its
value had dropped dramatically because of the tornado.
“The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me to think I wouldn’t be able to go back to Arkansas and [visit the lot] because someone else would be there,” she said. “I wanted the girls to have something positive about Arkansas when we go back. The idea that I couldn’t go back and visit it really weighed on me.”
That’s when she got the idea to donate the lot to the city, and her sister thought it was a great idea.
Wassom said she and Firestone met at a fast-food restaurant in Cabot to discuss it. She liked the idea of “something positive,” and they came up with the idea of a playground.
“What I’d like the neighborhood to be is like it was before or maybe better. We had a ton of children there,” she said, and they often wound up at her house. The neighborhood had just started to hold get-togethers, and neighbors talked about developing a community park, Wassom said.
“I think, overall, a park would be beneficial, especially to get people to move in there. None of the people I know who lived there are going back,” she said.
She went to Firestone with a suggestion for the inscription on the plaque that will go in the park: “In Loving Memory of Daniel R. Wassom II — Oct. 21, 1982 - April 27, 2014 — May he and the others who lost their lives that night never be forgotten.”
Firestone said a dedication will be held once the park is complete, and Wassom said she’ll attend, unless it’s in the spring.
“We’re just not going to come down there in tornado season; it’s just not going to happen,” she said.
Although it’s a sad situation, Wassom said, “I want to focus more on the happy side of it. We’re trying to heal, obviously. We talk positively about him; we talk about the happy memories.”
She and the mayor also hope the park will be a place for happy memories to be made.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.