Texas Equine Veterinary Association

Page 13 | The Remuda | SPRING 2024 EDITION Above left: The Grundy home was built in 1915 and they'd owned the house since 1981. It is gone now. Above right: Only this concrete structure was left standing. Photo courtesy Dvonna Grundy "All I could do was move one wrist and hand, I could barely breathe," Tim said. "My wife had a bruise on her arm, and that was it, She was on a bed of bricks. The bathtub had flipped over on the two grandkids, and they were ok." Tim was dug out of the rubble and loaded in the ambulance. His grandchildren and some friends went looking for his three horses on the property. One horse found 300 yards from the house had a punctured lung and cuts all over— he had to be euthanized. Another had been impaled with a two-by- four, and suffered other serious injuries, and he also had to be put down. But the horse that was missing was his favorite—MCC Chex Quixote—nicknamed "Peaches." Peaches has shown in ranch horse competition, and is a handy horse on the ranch. "Some of the boys from the ranch, and friends went trotting out trying to find one of my best horses," Tim said. "The next day—maybe 24 hours later, they saw Peaches." Peaches was found in one of his neighbor Ben Grundy's pastures with one of his horses. Ben's Story Ben Grundy runs cows and calves, raises horses, and farms hay and wheat. He has animals in several locations across the county. And had a few at his homestead in Matador, next to Tim's place. Ben needed to take a mare to the 6666 ranch, about 60 miles away, early the next morning for breeding. She was located in a pasture, and with rain coming, he didn't want her to be out in the mud when he went to get her. He and his wife Dvonna decided to go out that evening to bring her to stay closer to the house. "We pulled out of the driveway, and a friend of my wife's stopped us and asked if we wanted to get a drink," Ben said. "We weren't in any hurry—just saw a big cloud to the north of us. We never have had a tornado come from the north, so we stopped to get something to drink before we went and got her. We hadn't gotten 10 miles out of town when the tornado wiped us out. By the time we got back home, we didn't have anything to come home to." Everywhere they looked at their homestead, the buildings were gone. The two-story house built in 1915 that they'd owned since 1981 was flattened. The only thing still standing was an old cement smokehouse and the tree beside it. "My barns, my pens, everything else—there's nothing left of my house," Ben said. "Everything is just gone, just slicked it off." Over 60 chickens were gone, eight calves, many goats and half a dozen horses lay on the ground around the home site. One of Ben's horses was found in an 80-acre pasture. A filly named Cowgirl Reyes, nicknamed "Feather," was missing, though. A yearling who had just been started on halter breaking, she was not found with the rest of the dead animals at the home site. Below: Ben Grundy's filly Feather was found injured several days after the tornado struck in June 2023.

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