Louisiana mother, toddler killed when tornado destroys home

Damage from a tornado in Missouri in March.

(Image credit: Jon Durr/Getty Images)

published 3 April 2017

An extreme thunderstorm system stretching across the South spawned a tornado responsible for the deaths Sunday morning of a 38-year-old woman and her 3-year-old daughter in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

The St. Martin Parish's sheriff's office said a tornado flipped over Francine Gotch's trailer, killing her and her daughter, Neville Alexander. A second tornado was confirmed Sunday afternoon, southeast of Monroe. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center issued a "high risk" warning on Sunday, and the National Weather Service announced a "particularly dangerous situation" tornado watch from east Texas into west-central Mississippi.

Louisiana, Mississippi, and a thin sliver of Texas are bracing for tornadoes, massive hail, and high winds, and forecasters predict the system will move east through Monday. "We've got a large territory that these storms are going to be moving across," Danielle Banks, a meteorologist at The Weather Channel, told NBC News. "As we go through the day on Monday, into the heart of the afternoon, those storms are going to be sweeping through states like Georgia and Florida and over into South Carolina and North Carolina."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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