The sun was out in full force on May 16 when DeMarco K. Davidson walked into Centennial Christian Church in St. Louis’ Fountain Park neighborhood.
The executive director of Metropolitan Congregations United had a 1:30 p.m. meeting with longtime Centennial church member Sherrill Jackson. Davidson and Jackson were in the church’s north chapel. His phone was on silent. They were talking about the church’s future. Its pastor had resigned recently.
By 2 p.m., the natural sunlight beaming through the chapel’s large stained-glass windows was gone.
“We’re not thinking that much is going on,” Davidson said.
He got up, turned the lights on and continued the meeting. Fifteen minutes later, Davidson tapped his phone to check the time. Instead, he saw a missed call and texts from his mother. She wanted to know his location and if he was safe.
“Normally when she asks me that, she wants to make sure that I’m not driving, I’m not outside, I’m not somewhere unsafe,” Davidson said. “However, I did not know that a tornado was brewing.”
Nearly an hour and a half after the meeting started, an EF3 tornado would destroy the 121-year-old church and trap the pair inside, buried beneath the rubble. By the end of the storm, five people had died, including one at Centennial. More than 10,000 buildings and homes were significantly damaged or decimated, and countless people were displaced.
‘We didn’t hear a siren’
The lights began to flicker, and the sound of hail pummeling the stained-glass windows echoed throughout the chapel. Jackson and Davidson ended the meeting abruptly and got up to leave the room to get away from the windows and the glass table they were sitting at. The plan was to seek shelter downstairs and wait out the storm.
“Then the lights flickered and went off,” Davidson recalled. “Surprisingly, we didn’t hear any more hail. So I was like, ‘OK, it may not be as bad because I’m not hearing any more hail.’ That was a horrible assumption.”
The night before, Davidson heard a passing blurb on the news that the Midwest might get tornadoes that weekend. He thought it’d be another false alarm.
“We hear these types of things on the regular,” Davidson said. “I was like, ‘OK, that sucks. That’s terrible.’”
Davidson never imagined what was to come. An EF3 tornado had touched down in St. Louis, and Centennial Christian Church was in its path. Davidson and Jackson didn’t know that. The tornado sirens were not blaring in north St. Louis that day.
Davidson and Jackson were trying to find their way to the door in the dark. Before they could get to the door, they were startled by a loud crash. They didn’t know where it came from or what it was. The sound reminded Davidson of a chandelier shattering on the ground.
“I was trying to encourage sister Sherrill,” Davidson said. “We’ve got to move; move now!”
Then his ears popped.
“I did not know that was part of experiencing a tornado because of the atmospheric pressure,” Davidson said. “Your ears pop when you are near a tornado. That also gave me a high alert of, ‘Oh, no. What’s about to happen?’”
Everything happened quickly. The walls and doors started to shake violently. Davidson had a gut feeling a tornado was about to hit Centennial.
“That was one of the scariest moments, because it’s not like you can just jump away from a tornado,” Davidson said. “[You can’t] just duck and hide from a tornado, especially a tornado that is hitting a building. We never saw it coming. We didn’t hear a siren.”
Davidson and Jackson finally made it to the door. He opened it and saw Patricia Penelton. They didn’t know she was still inside the building. Penelton had been at the church earlier that day, meeting with people experiencing homelessness in the Fountain Park neighborhood. From where Davidson was standing, it looked like Penelton was trying to close the front door.
As Davidson held onto 78-year-old Jackson, trying to keep her covered, he yelled out to Penelton.
“Ms. Pat, get away from the d—”
Before Davidson and Jackson could get to Penelton, the floor of the church collapsed beneath them.
“I attempted to turn my body to protect sister Sherrill as we were falling,” Davidson said. “Thanks be to God that I had my bookbag on. It absorbed a lot of the shock and protected my back as we flew backwards. We definitely were several feet from where we started.”
Seconds later, they heard a loud boom. The sky was completely visible from inside the church.
“The roof came down,” Jackson said. “The floor sunk in and we went from upstairs to all the way downstairs in the library. And I could look and see a big board with nails in it.”
The ceiling and roof came crashing down around them. Davidson scanned the room for Penelton. He didn’t see her. They called out to her several times.
“We didn’t hear her,” Davidson remembered tearfully. “That was tough.”
He held onto Jackson. She was alert.
“‘Are you going to try to squeeze out of here?’” Jackson remembered Davidson asking her. “And I said: ‘No. Because I’m concerned that if I do that more debris is going to fall.’”
Davidson and Jackson were covered in debris. Near his foot was a pole with exposed electrical wires.
The pair would be trapped beneath the rubble for nearly two hours.
Davidson used his CPR training to make sure their airways were clear of debris. He checked for major physical injuries on both of them. He did his best to remove debris off Jackson’s body and lifted her up with his arm to relieve pressure off her neck and back. Davidson made sure she stayed alert the entire time.
“I even was like: ‘What’s your late husband’s name? Call out to him. Talk to him. Tell him you ain’t ready to meet him yet. But tell him to come protect us. We need that protection right now,’” Davidson said.
Calls for help
Davidson managed to hold onto his phone. To his surprise, he still had service.
“That gave me hope,” Davidson said.
St. Louis Public Radio obtained a copy of Davidson’s phone records for that day. He called 911 twice at 2:47 p.m., two or three minutes after the tornado. Instead of a live operator, he heard an automated message.
“Thank you for calling the nonemergency hotline. If this is an emergency, hang up and call 911.”
“When I heard that, I literally asked myself, ‘Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought,’” Davidson recalled. “‘Maybe there’s debris in my eye. Maybe the screen is dirty. Maybe I dialed a different number. Let me hang up and call again.’ It said the same message. I really felt like I was being gaslit. Like, this is demoralizing.”
Davidson was angry, but he collected himself. He was laser-focused on getting Jackson out of the church alive.
He let out a deep breath and started calling any and everyone he thought could help them. He called his sister, a licensed clinical social worker, and quickly explained where he was and what happened. He asked her to call 911 from St. Louis County and send help to 4950 Fountain Ave.
“I did not know if anything else from underneath us would just let go,” he said. “I did not know if the roof would keep falling in or not. So we need help. We need to be evacuated. We need rescue.”
He immediately hung up and called his fraternity brother, a St. Louis Metropolitan Police officer. That officer put in calls to alert emergency personnel that three people were trapped in Centennial. He called his mother, followed by his brother, a St. Charles County police officer. He put more eyes on Centennial.
Help still hadn’t arrived.
A St. Louis fire station, Engine House No. 28, is roughly a one-minute drive and a seven-minute walk from Centennial. But trees were down all over St. Louis, blocking major roads, including Kingshighway. Traffic was at a standstill.
Unexpected first responders
The Rev. Dietra Wise Baker was standing in the middle of Whole Foods when she saw Davidson’s name come across her phone. Wise Baker and Davidson made it a point to always answer each other's calls.
“I’m like, ‘What’s up, bro?’” said Wise Baker. “He’s like, ‘I’m at Centennial. I’m with Ms. Sherrill.’ The first thing I ask him is, ‘Which Ms. Sherrill?’ He’s like, ‘Don’t have time for that right now!’ I’m like, why is he so feisty? What’s wrong with him? And that’s when he says: ‘Dietra, the floor collapsed. The roof collapsed. We’ve been hit.’”
Wise Baker was unaware of the tornado. Wise Baker’s mind was racing. She wanted to keep Davidson on the line for as long as possible, fearful that if she ended the call she wouldn’t hear from him again. Davidson directed her to call 911 or anyone who could get them out. He told her the city’s 911 line wasn’t answering his calls for help.
Wise Baker was in disbelief.
The call ended, and she immediately dialed 911 from the middle of the grocery store in St. Louis County. A dispatcher picked up.
“There’s an emergency in St. Louis at my church,” she recalled telling the St. Louis County 911 operator. “He’s like, ‘I got to transfer you to the city.’ That’s what he says. ‘I got to transfer you to the city.’ I’m like, ‘OK, fine. As long as they pick up.’”
He transferred the call. The phone rang and eventually the line dropped. She called 911 back and got the same operator. Wise Baker told him that the call dropped.
“He goes, ‘I know. They’re overloaded,’” Wise Baker recalled the operator saying. “I’m like, ‘So you can’t take the call?’ He’s like, ‘No, you have to be transferred to the city.'”
The operator transferred her. Again, the call dropped.
“I’m furious at that point,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
In 2023, Forward Through Ferguson released a report examining the state of public safety in the St. Louis region. The report found the region’s 911 landscape is inefficient and fragmented, the technology is outdated, and the response times vary.
“People in the community know the longstanding fight and divide between St. Louis City and St. Louis County,” Wise Baker said. “You’re aware of the conversations that we’ve had. The crucial and critical conversations that we’ve had in our community about the need for St. Louis City and St. Louis County to be on the same page, for us not to have redundant services, how to be efficient. The fact that I called twice and spoke to a live person that told me, ‘This is St. Louis County 911, I have to transfer you to the city’ in an emergency is absolutely sinful. That’s what I’m going to call it.”
Wise Baker said she kicked into community organizer mode in the middle of Whole Foods. She ran through a list of names in her head and landed on 10th Ward Alderwoman Shameem Clark Hubbard. They’d worked together on projects before, they had a good relationship, and Centennial was in her ward.
Clark Hubbard received multiple texts and phone calls while she was visiting her father in the hospital during the height of the storm. She learned that Centennial sustained significant damage.
When Wise Baker called Clark Hubbard, she explained that not only was the church significantly damaged, but there were three people trapped inside and multiple attempts to call the city’s 911 for help went unanswered.
“She was saying notably that they could not get through to 911,” Clark Hubbard said. “Then that was my cue to call who I could call to try to get a response over there.”
Clark Hubbard ended the call and reached out to Maj. Donnell Moore and Capt. William Brown of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. She put in another call to Capt. Garon Mosby, but the call was transferred to Capt. Calvin Stewart with the St. Louis Fire Department.
“[I] told both of these first responders, again not knowing the severity, that there’s individuals trapped in Centennial Christian Church at Fountain,” Clark Hubbard said. “They were saying, ‘OK, we’ll get someone immediately over there.'”
Clark Hubbard shared with first responders that Davidson and Jackson were in Centennial’s north chapel.
According to Clark Hubbard, Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson said that one of the cell towers in the city was hit by the tornado, affecting phone service. He added it could have been a reason some of the calls weren’t getting through to 911 in St. Louis.
St. Louis Public Radio reached out to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the St. Louis Fire Department and the Department of Public Safety. Neither the St. Louis Fire Department nor the Department of Public Safety responded to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the fire department responded Monday afternoon following publication of this story, and said it's likely cell towers were compromised during the storm, but he could not confirm it. He did not provide additional comment on 911 protocols.
A St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson said in an email that the city’s 911 system was slammed with tornado-related emergency calls, including collapsed buildings and injuries. According to the department, it only received six phone calls about the church collapsing. The first one came at 3:03 p.m. In addition, the department said it received 336 service calls between 2:30 and 6:30 p.m. on May 16.
St. Louis Public Radio asked the police department if it was aware of some 911 calls being rerouted to the nonemergency line, and if it was protocol to do so when operators are inundated with calls.
A spokesperson declined to comment.
A community effort
As DeMarco K. Davidson’s calls for help pulsed throughout the region, Fountain Park residents took notice that the heartbeat of its community was down.
Longtime Fountain Park resident Clint Potts had just gotten home from work minutes after the tornado. His home was damaged, and one of his rental properties was completely lost. He said his neighbor flagged him down and told him that she saw people go into his church but didn’t see them come out. Potts was the first voice Davidson heard.
“We immediately went to make sure that they were OK,” said Potts, a lifetime member of Centennial. “The only voice that I heard was that of DeMarco of MCU. I hollered down, ‘How many people? Who’s in the church?’ I let them know that help is on the way. And we started the rescue effort ourselves.”
Several of Davidson’s friends, church members and Fountain Park residents joined Potts in recovery efforts. A member of Davidson’s church even brought a chainsaw and a hard hat. The Fire Department eventually made it to Centennial. Getting into the church safely proved difficult with all of the debris and unstable foundation. A door near Davidson and Jackson had to be cut for them to get out.
Jackson remembers responders pulling her out.
“[Davidson] told them to get me out first,” Jackson said. “He said, ‘Take Ms. Sherrill with you and you can come back and get me. They took me out and put me on the grass. When the stretcher came they put me on that.”
Jackson has survived a lot in her 78 years. She’s been cancer free for more than 30 years. But she never imagined surviving a tornado in a church she’s been a member of since she was 9 years old.
“I was really thankful that we got out alive, because it could have been a very different story,” Jackson said. “I was really sorry to hear that [Patricia Penelton] had lost her life.”
Her daughter is in the process of finding Jackson a therapist to help her navigate the trauma.
“You think you’re OK, but sometimes it’s traumatic and you don’t really realize that you’ve gone through trauma,” Jackson said.
When Davidson was pulled out, he was able to walk on his own. Davidson fought back tears as he described seeing members of his church, friends and family.
“I love my beloved community,” Davidson said. “Man, I love them. They were some of the first people that was hugging on me when I came out of the debris. I am blessed. I am blessed to have such amazing community. It was a communal effort. And that’s what it’s going to continue to take for us to deal with all of this destruction and damage.”
There were three people trapped inside Centennial Christian Church on May 16. Sherrill Jackson and DeMarco K. Davidson made it out alive. Davidson and Jackson were both taken to the hospital to treat minor physical injuries. They were released the same day.
However, 74-year-old Patricia Penelton did not survive.
“As soon as I got out, I was like, ‘We got to find Ms. Pat,’” Davidson recalled. “But then I looked over to the area where she was and I saw all of those bricks. That just made my heart sink even further. I think that was the time where I actually cried. That was the first time I cried in all of that was seeing all of those bricks where Ms. Pat was. Just feeling — that’s where I felt hopeless and helpless. I just can’t help but think, what else could I have done? I can’t help but to think that.”
Penelton — or Ms. Pat — had been a member of the church since 1986 with her husband. She was widely known for her compassionate heart, serving her community and her church. It was one of the last things Penelton did.
“I know my wife left here in a place that she loved being at, but she took the church with her,” said Harry Penelton III, her husband of nearly 55 years, during her funeral service.
Nearly four weeks later, Davidson is grieving and dealing with survivor’s guilt.
“I survived, but I’m not safe,” Davidson said. “I think that’s one of the elements to a lot of trauma. We survive a lot of things, but we are not safe. I wasn’t physically safe. And even afterwards, like we as a community, we’re not physically safe. We’re not mentally, emotionally, spiritually safe.”
‘Elected officials should not be our 911’
Many people across the city, including Davidson and Jackson, did not hear the tornado sirens go off on May 16. St. Louis officials have since acknowledged that systemic failure. On May 19, Mayor Cara Spencer confirmed that the reason the tornado sirens did not go off in the city was a “human failure.”
“Any elected official has to be prepared and has to be ready to be able to handle and address natural disasters in the most humane way,” Davidson said. “To me, if nothing else, that’s their responsibility in that moment, in that time frame. To address the pain and suffering in the most humane way possible. But saying that it’s a human error, it’s not going to happen again, but from now on I’ll take responsibility. That doesn’t feel humane. That doesn’t sound humane.”
The Rev. Dietra Wise Baker is still waiting for acknowledgement and accountability over St. Louis city and county’s fragmented and inefficient 911 system.
“That stuff costs people their lives,” Wise Baker said. “St. Louis City and St. Louis County [have] got to get that right. I know a lot of people are talking about [how] the sirens didn’t go off. But that 911 situation that happened demands an immediate investigation. That demands attention. We didn’t need to hear about jurisdictions of the city and the county. I don’t know when we’re going to figure out that what affects us affects all.”
Davidson agrees.
“Elected officials should not be our 911,” Davidson said. “Just flat out. That shouldn’t have happened. But the fact that it had to happen, it really does show [Alderwoman Shameem Clark Hubbard’s] commitment to the community. It shows her commitment to building relationships.”
Alderwoman Clark Hubbard acknowledged that the city 911 system still has work to do and that elected officials stepping in shouldn’t be the norm. However, she takes pride knowing that her constituents can trust her to help when there is a crisis.
“I don’t take for granted my position,” Clark Hubbard said. “The relationships that I have respectfully built with first responders to be able to even pick up the phone and call them. There is a real challenge and there continues to be a real challenge with our 911 response here in the city of St. Louis.”
A glimmer of hope
Centennial Christian Church’s story is far from over.
Less than a week after the tornado, the congregation selected Wise Baker to be its transitional pastor.
“I told them if they would be willing to support my leadership that I’d be willing to support them,” Wise Baker said. “And so, I stepped into that role.”
The congregation also voted to rebuild the church and keep it in the Fountain Park neighborhood. The church announced on May 28 a bold redevelopment project that will prioritize the church’s core mission of hunger, housing and healing.
“The first commitment is that we’re not going anywhere,” Wise Baker said. “I know folks are looking in our building and they’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, that’s it. They’re not going to be back.’ But we’re not going anywhere. We plan to be here another 121 years.”
The multimillion-dollar vision will include a new multipurpose worship and gathering space, an affordable housing unit in Fountain Park, a community health clinic, commercial and co-working space for local entrepreneurs and green space.
The church also announced that Eden Theological Seminary’s Eden Garden will be renamed in Patricia Penelton’s honor.
This story was updated to include a response from the St. Louis Fire Department.
