In the days after a tornado tore a path of destruction through Bowling Green, Kentucky, Rochelle Finkton held out hope. She was already dealing with the news that the tornado Dec. 10 had killed her sister Rachel Brown, along with Brown’s husband, Steven Brown, three of their four children and the children’s grandmother, Victoria Smith.

One child, Nyssa Brown, 13, was unaccounted for, and Finkton thought that maybe, somehow, her niece was in a hospital or had received shelter from the Salvation Army, she said.

On Thursday, Finkton was notified that Nyssa’s body had been found. Reached Saturday and still overcome with grief, she said she was relieved that authorities had found her niece, “so that we could have closure. For all of them to go home.”

Nyssa Brown was also the final victim to be recovered in Bowling Green.

Officials in Kentucky reported 77 fatalities statewide Friday with just one person still missing after several tornadoes devastated the state a week ago. The storm spawned one single tornado in particular that traveled nearly 164 miles through Kentucky, according to the National Weather Service. Overall, tornadoes in five states killed at least 90 people that night.

“It looks like a war zone,” Warren County Sheriff Brett Hightower said about the destruction in Bowling Green, where 16 people died during the tornado and an additional resident died of an apparent heart attack while clearing debris. “There’s rubble, there’s debris, there’s trees down, there’s guttering, there’s bricks, businesses that have been boarded up now, shattered glass.

“It went really through the heart of our community,” he said.

The tornado reached speeds as high as 150 mph as it shredded a path from Moss Creek Avenue, where the Brown family lived in a small but comfortable house, through the center of town.

On Saturday, Finkton said that the magnitude of the losses of her sister, brother-in-law, stepmother and nieces and nephews — Nariah Cayshelle Brown, 16; Nyssa Brown; Nolynn Brown, 8; and Nyles Brown, 4 — was just fully dawning on her.

“I’m just at a loss for words right now, because it just now really hit me,” she said, as she prepared to travel from her home in Indianapolis to Bowling Green for the funeral Tuesday.

She said the pain was made even greater by the fact that she won’t be able to see her sister’s body or be able to save anything from the house, which was blown apart.

“Their house was completely destroyed down to the foundation,” Hightower said.

“I don’t think anything was really salvaged because of the way it hit — it just blew everything,” Finkton said.

She and her sister (who spelled her first name as Rachael on social media) were close, she said, despite living hours apart. They would talk on the phone every other day, Finkton said. Sometimes Brown would call, upset about an issue within the family. “She just tried to help everybody. That’s the type of person she was,” Finkton said.

She said her sister was known as a happy person who loved her children, her husband and her mother, who was sick and whom Brown cared for. The family was close, Finkton said, and enjoyed going on outings and cooking together, especially on holidays, when they would cook ribs, beans, fried corn, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese from scratch.

“They just did family things — I mean it wasn’t much, but the things that they did, they made it awesome, and she always had a smile on her face,” Finkton said. “Even if they just went to the park, it was a family thing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company