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the pieces Friday after powerful storms pounded the region a day earlier.
• In Mississippi, Emergency Management Agency spokesman Jeff Rent said that one person died and 10 people were injured after a tornado struck Kemper County in the far-eastern part of the state on Thursday. Authorities said the man was killed when the tornado ripped apart a business. The National Weather Service said Friday that that tornado was a category EF-3 storm, with winds of 145 mph.
• At Contract Fabricators Inc. in Kemper County, bent pieces of tin hung from a heavily damaged building. A tractor-trailer was twisted and overturned, and debris from the business was strewn through the woods across the street.
• Derek Cody, an amateur storm chaser who works at East Mississippi Community College in Scooba, just south of Shuqualak (pronounced SHUG-a-lock), told The Associated Press he drove north on Thursday to the small town to try to catch a glimpse of a tornado.
• Cody said the center of Shuqualak, an eastern Mississippi town of 500 people, was unaffected. But he said a gas station and about 10 or so houses west of the town center were damaged. He said one house was "completely flattened" with debris blown across the road.
• Charlotte Conner, 47, and her mother were in a small, concrete block apartment on her family's property in Shuqualak in Noxubee County when the twister mowed it to the ground. The building, an old country store converted to an apartment, was reduced to a heap of broken concrete blocks and boards.
• Conner said in a telephone interview Friday that she grabbed her mother's hand to keep the woman from being sucked out of the house. The two women had injured knees, scratches and bruises, and Conner had five stitches in her chin.
• "I feel like I've been run over by an elephant and a train, but we're alive," Conner said. "It was just the hand of God that kept us safe."
• Conner's aunt, Cindy Moore, 56, worried that the two women had been killed when she saw the roof of the concrete block building they were in hung in trees across the street in Shuqualak and their belongings scattered in the yard.
• In Alabama, officials confirmed a tornado with winds up to 120 mph blew through a rural stretch east of Montgomery. Two weaker tornadoes touched down in Huntsville -- about 190 miles north of Notasulga, where an EF-2 tornado hit. No one was hurt in the state, though damage was scattered across several counties.
• Friday-morning light showed there wasn't much left of the two-story home near Notasulga that 41-year-old James Brooks shared with his wife, Billieanne, and their three children.
• With the lights out and the storm bearing down on the home, Brooks said he went to the kitchen to get a candle. Loud thunder rumbled continuously, and he

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