Hero Mom Miraculously Held Onto Her Baby as a Tornado Threw Them in the Air

She vows her two-month-old wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for her car seat.

As a shrieking wind picked up in Fresh Orleans on Tuesday, Amanda Stockfelt knew she had just moments to act – a tornado was coming, and quick.

On a normal day, Stockfelt and a colleague work inwards a metal trailer, alone, as clerks at an impound yard in the eastern part of the city. But it wasn’t a normal day. Her two-month-old daughter had had a doctor’s appointment that morning, and had accompanied her mom to work.

With the fear of the tornado harming her baby, Stockfelt’s maternal instincts kicked in. “All I could think of was to put my daughter back in her car seat, to strap her in,” she told Today. “I shoved her underneath my work desk and I got underneath with her.”

She had just lodged under the desk, her daughter and co-worker cramped in next to her, when the trailer flipped over rearwards and ripped apart. “It was like the trailer just broke into a million lumps,” she explained. “And then the tornado sucked us up.”

As Stockfelt was pulled into the air, she kept one arm hooked through the treat of her daughter’s car seat, even when she was lifted over her head – the tornado was attempting to rip her daughter from her grip. Stockfelt felt her sneakers slip off her feet and vanish into the storm.

“I never let go because I was afraid if I let go, it was going to take her and I’d never find her,” she told Today. “It was the most horrifying thing in my life.”

After the winds moved onward, Stockfelt landed ten feet from where the desk had been – still clutching the car seat.

Miraculously, the baby didn’t sob once, something that doctors attributed to shock. “I thought she was dead,” her mother said. “She wasn’t howling and at very first her eyes were closed because of the filth and the rain.”

The aftermath of the tornado was a blur – Stockfelt’s beau came to get her and the baby in his truck to bring them to the hospital after ambulances couldn’t get to them. But gratefully, besides scrapes and wounds, all was well. “I’m still attempting to wrap my mind around it,” Stockfelt said, on her shock and gratitude.

Beyond her quick thinking, Stockfelt attributes her daughter’s survival to the car seat. “Graco makes the best car seats in the world, because if it wasn’t for this car seat, she’d be dead,” Stockfelt explained.

She’s not the only mother to turn to car seats in dire, life-threatening situations. Last week in Wyoming, Shelby Carter strapped her newborn daughter into her car seat, broke a 2nd story window and dropped her baby to safety as fire ravaged her home. Carter, unluckily, died in the blaze – but she is being hailed as a hero for saving her baby, who is now healthy and in the care of family members.

Stockfelt used a similar method, but knows how close both she and her daughter came to meeting Carter’s fate. “We lived and I’m able to tell you our story,” she told Today. “I don’t know, obviously God has a plan for me and my daughter because other than by God’s grace, we shouldn’t be here.”

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