A Pennsylvania mom was killed while cheering on her daughter at the teen’s softball camp when several branches suddenly fell from a tree and struck her in the head.
Gendie Miller, 49, took shelter from the 90-degree heat beneath a tall tree alongside her husband, Bill, while they watched their 16-year-old daughter scrimmage in front of prospective college coaches at the Western PA College Showcase softball camp Thursday.
While they were lounging beneath the old tree, Bill told WTAE he suddenly heard a loud cracking noise and hurried to usher his wife of 17 years away.
“I said to my wife, ‘Let’s go.’ I jumped out of my chair, felt a small branch of some sort that grazed my leg. And I immediately turned to my right to look back at her, and she was face down with large, multiple branches and limbs,” he told the outlet.
One of the branches hit Gendie’s head. She fell unconscious and was pinned beneath the heap of fallen tree limbs, their daughter’s softball coach wrote in a GoFundMe organized for the family.
Many of the branches were between 10 to 12 inches thick, Bill said. Bystanders tried to help Gendie while emergency responders rushed to the scene.
The crew loaded her into an ambulance headed to Forbes Hospital and was trying to evaluate if she could handle an airlift to a more advanced trauma center when she stopped breathing, according to the GoFundMe.
Gendie was pronounced dead at Forbes Hospital.
“To be so traumatic, and with the heavy load of the type of branch and limb, it was devastating. And I can tell you that she didn’t die from her heart, because her heart’s too big,” Bill told the outlet.
He said Gendie was a devoted mom who “would never miss a practice or an event” regardless of what it was or how far away.
“That was who she was,” he said.
All donations to the GoFundMe will go to the family to help lift the “burden off of coming up with funds they don’t have right now for something so sudden and unexpected,” according to the fundraiser.
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