EL PASO - When news came trickling in that a tornado had struck Vilonia, some 8 miles away, many El Paso residents high-tailed it.

Betty Walker, 73, had been listening intently to the radio in her El Paso Road home, tracking the tornado. About five minutes before it tore through her street, Walker and her husband rushed to a friend’s home down the road to hunker down in a storm cellar.

“I just sat there and prayed,” she said.

Even though he had a storm cellar, Victor Lockert, 48, said, he pushed his wife and grandson out the door and sped to the first gas station in Beebe, where the three took refuge for an hour.

Rachel Massey and her husband “hauled it” to her mother-in-law’s Bee Branch home in advance but left behind their two boxer dogs, she said. By the time the tornado was ripping its way into the unincorporated town, the couple - who live across the street from Walker - had already made it to Quitman, Massey, 24, said.

But Paula Blakemore, 55, stayed put.

Alone in her “triple-wide trailer,” Blakemore received a call from her mother asking her to go to the elder woman’s home right before the touchdown, said Walker, a cousin. Later that night, emergency personnel - White County sheriff’s deputies, El Paso volunteer firemen, the coroner and others - dotted the street, just off Arkansas 5, blocking off any passing traffic until early Monday.

Blakemore was the only one in White County who didn’t make it. She was among 15 Arkansans who died.

On Monday, remnants of the tornado were splayed over her property - a Pepperidge Farm bread bag, pieces of wood, a bagof scratch grains and several soda bottles. A brick pathway led up to the four concrete steps of what would have been Blakemore’s trailer.

Just across the street, a home - wrapped in yellow police tape - was left in shambles. A tricycle slumped on its side in the driveway, a car sitting askew. All of the five who were in that home were OK, Walker said.

Michael Howard, 35, drove through the neighborhood mid-Monday as he snaked his way from his friend’s 14-acre farm a mile northeast from El Paso to Conway. The Kentucky resident stopped at his friend’s farm while en route to Dallas because of the inclement weather, he said.

With the weather radar on his smartphone, Howard stood on his friend’s porch watching the tornado unfold.

“[It] was not super wide,” he said. “It seemed like it was getting more narrow. There were all kinds of debris flying in the air - big pieces of wood, like shingles, from a roof. It sounded like a jet on a runway. My ears started popping. In the distance, I could hear wood cracking.”

In what became a nearly all-day affair, residents in the neighborhood began returning to their homes early Monday to find downed trees and power lines and damage to their homes.

Massey’s family banded together to repair the roof and siding of the home she grew up in. A large tree snapped, and her dog pen was ruined, but the two boxers survived. A path of exposed dirt curved behind her home to the side - the path of the tornado, she said.

That path continued across the street, just past Walker’s home.

“It skipped over our house and just sat back down,” Walker said. “The good Lord took care of us.”

Front Section, Pages 5 on 04/29/2014