Tree crushes house of grandmother raising children of murdered daughter
Anybody who was upset that the power was out for a few hours or a day after Wednesday's storm, or downed trees forced a detour while driving for coffee, or their Internet service or cable TV was out, ought to meet the incredible 65-year-old Brenda Langley, who went to work Thursday scrubbing floors in a nursing home.
On Monday, Langley buried a daughter who was murdered. Langley is raising her daughter's three youngest kids. Early Wednesday morning, a massive oak tree that stood on Cauthen Street in Rock Hill, along the cracked sidewalk of the old mill hill for decades, fell in the raging storm that swept through York County.
"It landed right on top of the roof on top of me in my bed, and the grands in their beds," said Langley. "Sounded like the heavens was falling on us. It knocked down all the bricks inside, too, the fireplace just fell. There's an old saying, 'When it rains, it pours.'"
This is not rain. Noah's flood fell on Brenda Langley, and she has no ark.
Langley was on the front page of Tuesday's Herald after the funeral, talking about her daughter, Katherine Ballard McManus, her grandkids, and a funeral she could not pay for. Now, her rented home is destroyed.
Brenda Langley responded just like anybody who has ever met her, or anybody who knows nothing but work and faith would expect. She responded like a champion.
She sent the kids to stay with another daughter up the street. She retrieved clothes. Later Wednesday, she hustled around Rock Hill, looking for another rental house and came up with nothing but thin air.
"This has been one rough couple of weeks," said Langley's surviving daughter, Ashley Smith. "What else can happen?"
Yet Brenda Langley was undaunted, somehow, on Thursday. Langley, her home in shambles and one daughter dead and her bankbook empty, went to work Thursday. She worked a full shift, from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Then, she came back to Cauthen Street and saw the carnage of her life. She hugged her granddaughter, 8-year-old Lizzie Ballard, the youngest of the three kids Langley is raising. The others are boys, ages 10 and 15.
"The Lord shall provide," Langley said to that granddaughter, Lizzie, as she held the child's hand.
"I know he will, and that Devil won't get us," said Lizzie, an orphan in the second grade, who somehow smiled as she looked at what was left of her house.
On Thursday, a crew from RBRP Contractors was working on the house next to Langley's. They could not believe the cruelty of Mother Nature after the cruelty of the daughter's murder.
"Nobody deserves this," said Richard Platko, a siding installer with arms full of muscle sticking out of a tank top and a human being with shards of pain sticking out of his wounded heart.
"The lady needs a break," said David Moss, carpenter and father of little kids. "What happened to this lady and those kids just ain't fair."
Langley's employer, White Oak Manor, had already helped with money and assistance for the funeral that still is not fully paid for. A stranger showed up at the nursing home with a $100 check. White Oak remains committed to helping Langley get through an ordeal that Jane Alexander, administrator at the assisted living center, said, "no person should have to endure."
"Brenda and those children need us now more than ever," Alexander said. "Brenda works hard. Very hard. This storm dealt a blow to a woman who didn't deserve it."
Yet somehow, through a daughter shot to death in Virginia on April 30 in a crime police say was committed by an abusive boyfriend, and a house crumpled under a tree, Brenda Langley did not feel sorry for herself.
She stood in the middle of Cauthen Street.
She raised her eyes to the heavens that had seemed to crash down on her during the storm, and for days before, and she raised her hands.
She said, "God, I believe in you."
Then she left, to search for a place to live.
Want to help?
White Oak Manor is assisting Brenda Langley. To donate:
Call Jane Alexander at 803-366-8155
Email jalexander@whiteoakmanor.com
Write to: White Oak Manor, 1915 Ebenezer Road, Rock Hill, SC 29732
This story was originally published May 13, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Tree crushes house of grandmother raising children of murdered daughter."