Family Reels in Wake of Tornado That Took Baby From Mother’s Arms : Disaster: In seconds, their only son was gone--dashed to death in the mud along with their home, their possessions and their dreams.

In the brief, ringing silence that came after the tornado passed, Donna Ray realized that 15-month-old Benjamin was gone.

The 250-m.p.h whirlwind had torn the couple’s only son from his mother’s arms. Their mobile home had exploded. The family of six was suddenly five.

“I was the one who had hold of Benny. I was supposed to have held onto him and not let anything hurt him,” Donna said. “There’s nothing worse than knowing you can’t keep things from hurting your kids, that you’ve got no control.”

And there was no one to blame. “It was nobody’s fault,” Donna’s husband, Tim, said flatly. It is the freak nature of the tragedy that is hardest to take.

“I just want him back--want to watch him grow up,” Donna said. “We tried so long to have a little boy, and then we get him, and he’s gone.”

Geneva Speer, the baby’s great-aunt, said: “They had three girls and wanted a boy so bad. They really couldn’t afford to have all them kids, but they kept having them until they got them a boy.”

More than a month after Benjamin’s death, the Rays still are reliving the moments before everything stopped making sense. They retrace their steps but know there is no changing them.

The June 2 storm, which killed eight people and injured 180, was the worst to hit Indiana in 16 years. It spun through this town in four minutes and devoured the Rays’ home in Riverview Trailer Park in seconds.

Tim, Donna and their three young daughters wound up in different hospitals, their lives uprooted like the 20 poplar trees that used to shade their home on hot August afternoons.

The two-acre trailer park now resembles a haunted battleground littered with the remains of everyday life: Dad’s ratchet, the dog’s rubber ball, the ironing board and the children’s brightly colored toys.

“The thing that keeps us going are the three little girls. We can still pick them up and hold them,” said Tim, 31, a wiry man with a freckled face. “But my little boy . . . I was not ready to give him up.”

The tornado struck without warning.

“We’d just come home from the store. I’d no more than got the water on to boiling for dinner,” said Donna, 27, who first noticed the greenish, churning sky from the kitchen window.

“They say tornadoes make a noise, but we didn’t hear anything. We were already in the middle of it,” she said.

Donna screamed for her husband. “Get in back!” Tim shouted. The lights flickered and went out.

Each parent grabbed two children. Donna had her left arm around Benny. With her right, she dragged 6-year-old Abby by her blue-flowered summer dress. “Get in back!” Tim yelled again.

It was too late. The trailer’s four walls blew out. Donna looked down. The ground was swirling beneath her. Hold onto Benny, hold on, she thought.

Then Benny was gone. “Oh my God!” Donna cried and fell to the ground. The tornado had passed.

When Tim opened his eyes he saw Benny, lying face down a few feet from the boy’s unconscious mother. “I picked him up and he was real limp,” Tim said. “It was quiet, like in a desert. There was just silence all around.”

Then came the tears.

Abby, Ginny, 7, and 3-year-old Melissa were half-buried in debris, their pale skin gashed and their fine hair matted with blood. Tim groped toward them, pulling himself out of the mud each time his broken leg collapsed under him.

Donna soon came around, but she was in a daze.

“All I could think about was getting help,” said Donna. Her forehead was slashed and her collarbone was broken when the wind’s current dropped her.

“I wanted to get Benny in the car because it was raining and cold. I was telling myself: ‘I’m going to get help. I’m going to take him to the hospital.’ ”

The Rays strapped the baby into his car seat. But they knew. Benny was motionless, silent, showed no sign of breathing. His soft skull had been crushed.

“I just didn’t want to admit that it could be my baby that was taken,” said Donna. Her expression is more blank than bitter.

The funeral was a blur. Sad embraces, prayers led by a Pentecostal minister whom Tim met back when he first started working at a local fast-food restaurant 10 years ago. It took only two pallbearers to lift the small metal casket into the hearse.

Faith is the frequent counsel in this town of 14,000 people, 42 Christian churches and about 75 pastors.

Friends and strangers tell the Rays that Benjamin is God’s child now, but it is little comfort.

“Some would say it’s an act of God . . . but try telling that to the woman whose baby is jerked out of her arms,” said the Rev. Max Toliver, a Methodist minister and neighbor whose own trailer also was destroyed by the storm.

Tim and Donna, who don’t attend church regularly, have gratefully accepted prayers, Bibles, pamphlets and other gestures meant to ease their despair. They know about counseling, the books on loss and the talk shows on pain.

Yet nothing works. Nothing can restore Benny or the personal dream that Tim and Donna nearly grasped before they were sucked into the vortex.

“When we got married I set some goals. I wanted to have little boys, and I’ve always wanted to have a garden, fence off a place, get the kids a pony, maybe build them a big old playhouse,” Tim said.

That was eight years ago, when the couple set out to have the kind of large and close family they had known growing up in this rural area about 60 miles south of Indianapolis.

The night the tornado hit, Tim and Donna were feeling good. They had made a dent in their debts and set aside part of the $20,000-a-year salary Tim earns managing a Hardee’s restaurant. They were planning to buy a piece of land somewhere in the rolling, green country nearby.

Now they are living in a rented house stocked and paid for with thousands of dollars from strangers, relatives, co-workers and friends.

“This community is a family,” said Donna. “I don’t know how we’re ever going to thank them, and that bothers us.”

Accepting spontaneous charity has been painful for the Rays, who have always done for themselves. They are the kind of people who fix their own cars or sew their own clothes out of pride as much as practicality.

They took pride in their baby pictures and birth certificates, the girls’ favorite dolls, Tim’s comic book collection, Donna’s half-finished new dress, even the red polka-dot cutouts for learning the alphabet--all things the tornado took and scattered over miles of wooded and rain-soaked land.

“You can tell they loved their kids a lot. Just look at all these toys,” said the Rev. Johnny Johnson of Dive Christian Church.

He was one of those who showed up after the storm to help the Rays save what muddied belongings they could. They burned the rest.

“When I first saw this, I went home and cried,” said Beth Cooper, a mother of two who showed up to help a couple she had never met. “I suddenly knew how close we are to dust.”

Now, in the wreckage of their lives, the Rays see the normalcy they once had, the sense of control they are struggling to regain. They are looking for some small order amid the chaos.

Donna wants a new blue mailbox with a red flag, like the one she used to visit each day for bills and the occasional card. When Cuddles, one of the two family dogs, turned up alive miles from home, the slightly terrorized and bedraggled pup seemed a gift from God.

“You’ve got to have certainties,” Johnson said, tossing a ruined garment into the bonfire. “They give you hope, strength, goals--and everybody needs those because, evidently, what you own is not for certain.”

Tim and Donna still are thinking about what inscription they want on their son’s headstone. Most likely, it will be something simple: Our little Benny.

“Mommy, did Benjamin die?” Abby asked not long after the storm. “He went to heaven, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did,” Donna told her.

“We’re telling the kids that he went to heaven. I think it helps them,” she said.

“But me, I just want him back.”