By Jim McCarthy and Tiffany Duong
A Key Largo man is lucky to be alive after Tropical Storm Eta’s fierce winds uprooted a tree that came toppling onto his residence. Another couple not far away says they’re fortunate two large trees that fell didn’t crash onto their home.
Eta’s presence was felt upon arrival during the evening of Nov. 8 through the morning and afternoon of Nov. 9. With wind gusts peaking above 60 mph came broken limbs and some toppled trees. For Dylan Deese, who lives on Transylvania Avenue with his dog Aries, a large tree next to his house disrupted his evening.
“This was definitely the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me. Not the first time I’ve split my head open, but the craziest story how,” Deese told the Weekly.
He was enjoying what he calls a “normal Sunday night” watching “Oceans 11” on his couch when he saw a tree “coming through the door.” Then his roof came down and pinned him under debris for a minute.
Deese and Aries got lucky ‒ really lucky. The only part of the house that wasn’t smashed by the enormous tree happened to be the spot Deese was sitting in. He normally relaxes in a recliner, but that day he had chosen to sit on the sofa instead. Part of the roof “stabbed straight through” his favored chair. Aries, sensing something, had instinctively run under the kitchen island, which blocked the tree from smashing her. She was curled up under without a scratch; the spot the canine had been sleeping in was “completely trashed,” Deese said.
After Deese freed himself from the rubble, he stood in the pitch black and under the pouring rain in his now roofless house. Scared, dazed and streaming blood, his first thought after realizing he was more or less okay was to find his dog. She’d made no noises, and he thought the worst.
“That was the most emotion I’ve ever felt in my life,” a still-tense Deese said.
A neighbor ran out screaming Deese’s name looking for him, and others soon came with flashlights, shoes and a jacket. Once they extracted him from the rubble, one asked Deese if they should call the cops, to which he replied “Yeah. Definitely. There’s a massive tree on my house.”
Deese called it a blessing in and of itself that his neighbors were so quick to come over and put themselves in harm’s way to help. One patched Deese’s head up (he eventually received 13 staples at Mariners Hospital) and others found Aries hiding under the island. Deese broke out crying at the news.
At the hospital, after getting stapled up and a CT to check for internal bleeding, the doctors told Deese he was lucky to be alive and that he could go home. Without a home to go back to, he took a taxi to a neighbor’s house, where he stayed on a cot.
“The wind was still ripping. I didn’t sleep at all,” said Deese. “I heard the wind pick up and it was like instant trauma. I was still shaking, still terrified.”
Less than a mile from Deese were Alan and Simona Thomson, who live on Bonito Avenue in Key Largo. Situated on the corner of their property is a ficus. At roughly the same time that Deese found himself trapped under the massive tree, Simona had gone outside to shut her fence gate and noted that the ficus looked like it was going to fall.
Sure enough, it did. The ficus fell around 10:30 p.m.
“I was in the shower when I heard something,” Simona said. “I came out to find the tree on the fence. Had I not closed the gate door, the tree would have hit the house.”
Not long after the ficus fell, a massive tamarind tree located just behind the Thomsons’ residence split. The tree ended up falling into nearby properties, but no damage was done to their home. Alan said the tamarind toppled some 30 minutes after the ficus tree fell.
“We got lucky,” Alan said as he glanced at both trees the day after Eta’s arrival. “It was a train of storms that lasted three to four hours. It was nonstop.”
Alan said the tamarind tree falling sounded like a “gunshot going off.”
“We heard a big noise and we said ‘what the heck was that?’” Alan said. “My wife looked all through the backyard and she looked out the back window and said a bigger tree was down.”
Eta’s impact was heavily felt in Key Largo as residents woke up the next day to deal with the debris and mess. But the Thomsons and Deese say they’re lucky their situations didn’t end up worse.
“If I had moved, got up and walked to the kitchen, been in the bathroom, I would have been done,” Deese said. “Squished. I feel like there’s someone watching over me. I feel seriously blessed to still be here and to have my dog.”Deese lost most of what he owns. To contribute to a GoFundMe hurricane relief fund his stepmom set up, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/dylan-hurricane-eta-relief.
