Woman dead after tree falls onto her home in Atlanta, firefighters say

ATLANTA — A family is grieving after a tree fell onto their loved one’s home, killing the woman inside.

Firefighters were at the home in Atlanta, where a tree crashed into the roof of the house, early Tuesday morning. Atlanta firefighters said a woman who was trapped inside died.

The woman is believed to be in her 70s and was asleep when the tree crashed, firefighters said. The house is located in the 2000 block of Ridgemore Road in northwest Atlanta.

Neighbors woke up to see firefighters working to rescue the woman. A tree from the backyard sliced through the home.

“It is just so sad – no weather what caused the tree to fall – that she was home. Just heartbreaking,” Anne Miller Garrad told Channel 2′s Christian Jennings. “Heart goes out to her and her family.”

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Firefighters said when they first arrived they could hear the woman call out to them. By the time they reached her, the woman had died.

Sgt. Cortez Stafford said this was a dangerous, difficult task for rescuers who did everything they could.

“After two and a half hours of working to get to her and securing the tree and getting all the debris out of the way, we did in fact discover she had succumb to the injuries,” he said.

Garrad lives a few homes down and said she is concerned about her family’s safety after seeing what happened Tuesday.

“That tree was dead. It was completely dead. You could see it’s rotten on the inside,” she said. “We’re going to have tree companies come out and look. But it’s the difficulty to take down a tree then something like this happens – there has to be a balance.”

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