Lightning killed a Florida mother and one of her 2-year-old twin girls as they hurried across a lawn to beat an approaching storm on Sunday, striking them down a few feet from the man who was both husband and father.
Kenya Glasgow, 31, and her daughter Kennedi were found lying on the sidewalk along the 7900 block of Northwest 1st Street in Margate, about a 50-minute drive north of Miami, after the strike around 2:30 p.m., the Margate Police Department said. Officers and fire rescue crews who responded to a report of two people struck by lightning began CPR at the scene. Mother and daughter were taken to separate hospitals, where each was pronounced dead a short time later.
Kameron “Kam” Glasgow, Kenya’s husband, was only a few feet away when the bolt hit, and he felt the electricity race up out of the ground and into his legs. He lived. His wife and daughter did not.
“I saw the whole thing,” Glasgow told The Post on Monday, breaking into sobs as he recounted what happened.
A Family Dinner That Never Happened
The four of them had just arrived at the house of Glasgow’s aunt for dinner with relatives. As the downpour intensified, the parents decided they had to get the girls out of the rain. Kenya set off for the front door with Kennedi. They never reached it.
Kennedi’s twin, Kensli, was still in the car when the bolt struck, and she was unhurt. Her father is now left to raise her by himself and, one day, to explain her sister’s death to her. He said he has to be OK for the daughter he still has, though at 2 she is too young to understand that her twin is gone.
Worse than the shock itself, Glasgow said, was turning around and seeing his wife and child motionless on the ground. Only God’s grace, he said, explains why he is still alive. In a Facebook post, he described the deaths as a freak accident with 1-in-1.2-million odds and said it could not be real.
Together Since They Were 16
Kenya Glasgow and her husband were high school sweethearts, meeting at about 16 and spending roughly 15 years together. Their wedding was four years ago, and their fourth anniversary would have fallen in November.
Her husband called her the most amazing spirit in this world, a woman with an enormous heart who put everyone else first and turned up for people without hesitation. Kennedi shared that big heart, he said, and loved the musician Benson Boone enough to sing his songs back word for word.
Writing on Facebook on Monday, Glasgow said he had lost his best friend and that his surviving daughter had lost hers. Losing his own father a few years earlier, he said, taught him never to question God. His children did not suffer, he wrote, and he asked anyone who felt the light his wife and daughter brought into the world to hold onto it, a reminder that being kind takes very little.
In another tribute posted to social media, Glasgow thanked Kenya and Kennedi for choosing him as their husband and father and said he and Kensli would take it one day at a time, confident the two were guiding them. The family, he said, will lean on a wide circle of relatives and friends he counts as family.
More Than 200 Strikes in an Hour
To neighbors, the weather seemed ordinary at first — thunder, lightning and another summer rain. Then came a strike that shook their homes.
The storm was far fiercer than it appeared. Doppler radar tracked more than 200 lightning strikes within 20 miles of Margate between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. Sunday. Five cloud-to-ground strikes were recorded by the National Weather Service within a mile of the spot where the Glasgows were hit.
Such deaths are extraordinarily uncommon. Roughly 37 million bolts reach the ground across the United States in a typical year, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts any individual’s risk of being struck at less than one in a million, and close to 90% of those hit survive. In Florida, experts peg the odds of being struck at about 1 in 500,000.
Kenya and Kennedi Glasgow were the 11th and 12th people killed by lightning in the country this year, according to the National Lightning Safety Council. They were the third and fourth lightning deaths in Florida this year, the National Weather Service in Miami said.
Thunder can carry as far as 15 miles, which is why forecasters urge people to head indoors the moment they hear it, according to Chris Vagasky, who analyzes lightning data for the National Lightning Safety Council. “If you can hear it, you are in that danger zone to be struck by lightning,” Vagasky said.
Margate police said the investigation into exactly what happened on that lawn was ongoing.