Tornado crosses the Rio Grande, killing 10

Mary Lou Ramos watched in wonder as the sun set in the clear indigo sky Wednesday night.

Twenty-four hours earlier, rain, wind and large hailstones pounded her mobile home on the edge of this bustling border town.

When an ominous whooshing sound signaled the approach of a tornado, Ramos, 36, and her husband grabbed their three children and fled to a relative’s house with nothing but the clothes on their backs. She later learned that the tornado had flattened her home.

“I can’t believe what happened.... It happened so fast; we have nothing left,” Ramos said.

All day, Ramos and hundreds of residents in communities on both sides of the U.S-Mexico border struggled to absorb the devastation left by a ferocious tornado that hopscotched through the area Tuesday, killing at least 10 people and injuring more than 160.

Seven of the victims died on the U.S. side, in a rural area south of the city of Eagle Pass. Across the Rio Grande, at least three people died in the town’s sister city of Piedras Negras.

Five of the dead -- a young girl and four adults -- were found in a mobile home that had been swept up by the tornado and slammed against the Rosita Valley Elementary School.

“We’re all just numb,” said Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass, who spent Wednesday assessing the damage near this city of 25,000 about 140 miles west of San Antonio.

At the Eagle Pass Multi-Purpose Center, 150 evacuees filled the gym to capacity. Cots and air mattresses crowded the floor, and the smell of fried chicken distributed by the Red Cross was in the air.

Evacuee Deyonira Ontiveros was happy to have a roof over her head. As the storm passed through Tuesday, the roof of her mobile home caved in as she huddled with her six children.

When the worst seemed to be over, she hurriedly crammed blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and headed to a shelter with her family.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “We don’t know how we’re going to come back from this.”

Residents may be allowed to return to their homes today, police said, but many won’t have much to return to.

“It’s just devastating,” said Randy Clark, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who traveled to the area before dawn Wednesday along a highway littered with abandoned cars, split trees, downed telephone poles and dead animals.

A few miles south of Eagle Pass, the tornado lifted several mobile homes off their lots, tore the roof off an elementary school and damaged an early-childhood learning center.

The National Guard searched for bodies in a hard-hit neighborhood nearby.

Across the border, in Piedras Negras, a Roman Catholic church was demolished but two orphanages were spared south of town.

More than 80 residents were injured in Eagle Pass and taken to Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center, the city’s only hospital. Of those, four were critically injured and airlifted to San Antonio and 32 were discharged with minor injuries.

As the severe storm swept east through Louisiana on Wednesday, it was linked to another death: A 101-year-old man was killed in a fire started when lightning hit a tree near his mobile home in Shreveport.

The thunderstorm that produced the category F-3, or severe, tornado came as a cold front mixed with tropical air over the mountains in Mexico, a few miles southwest of Eagle Pass, said Pat McDonald, a spokesman for the National Weather Service. A tornado watch had been issued for the region about five hours before the tornado hit about 7 p.m.

On the U.S. side, the tornado struck subdivisions in a rural area of Maverick County. A grocery store, health clinic and other businesses were destroyed, and at least 100 homes were damaged, officials said.

Three years ago, a flash flood deluged Piedras Negras, a town of about 142,000 in the Mexican state of Coahuila, killing at least 36 people. Officials in Eagle Pass, which has a 95% Latino population, said they were communicating with officials across the border, and had already provided chain saws and generators.

“We are sister communities,” said City Councilman Ramsey English Cantu. “We are not divided by the river but united.”

As rescue teams searched debris-filled lots for missing people, Texas Gov. Rick Perry toured the storm-damaged area and issued disaster proclamations for Maverick County, as well as two other counties in north Texas where tornadoes caused heavy damage Monday.

“The state will stand with these communities throughout this tragedy, from rescue to full recovery,” Perry said.

Faustino Garza, 54, hopes the governor is true to his word.

He’s anxious to go home, repair the windows that shattered during the storm and move on with his life.

“It’s over now. I want to start cleaning up and get back to the way things were,” he said.

lianne.hart@latimes.com

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

Hart reported from Eagle Pass and Jarvie from Atlanta.