Grandmother of Young Hurricane Dorian Victim Breaks Down While Reacting to His Passing

A news report is going viral, showing a grandmother mourning her grandson — one of the first victims of Hurricane Dorian. The Category 5 storm raged through the Bahamas over the weekend, and Ingrid McIntosh told reporters that her grandson, Lachino, was drowned in the flooding.

McIntosh told her story in an interview with Eyewitness News. So far, it sounds like her grandson was the first fatality in the devastating storm. Lachino was either 7 or 8 years old according to varying reports, and his family is heartbroken.

“I don’t know what to feel, my grandson’s dead. I just saw my grandson about two days ago and he told me he loved me,” McIntosh said. “He turned round and said ‘Grandma I love you’ and you know what I told my grandson? I said ‘that feels so good because I haven’t heard that in a long time from no one.’”

McIntosh said that her granddaughter went missing in the storm, and has not turned up yet either. She is terrified by the thought that she, too, is a victim of the natural disaster.

“My granddaughter’s gone my daughter, their parent, called and said Lachino is dead,” she said.

McIntosh said that her daughter, Lachino’s 31-year-old mother, found his remains at one of the emergency clinics in the area. She had just gotten the bad news hours before appearing on air, so the report was full of raw emotion. Reporters did their best to comfort the grieving grandmother, but there was only so much they could do.

McIntosh was facing the added frustration of poor communication in the islands. Thanks to the storm, she was unable to connect with her daughter for more updates. In a separate report, Bahama Press wrote that Lachino had “drowned after his family attempts to relocate their home.”

Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas and the rest of the Caribbean hard, crawling over the islands at a mere 1 mile per hour. This subjected the community to the storm’s brutal 225 mile per hour wind gusts for a prolonged period, and gave them about 30 inches of rainfall.

An estimated 13,000 homes were destroyed in the storm, and power lines all over the islands were knocked down. As of Monday morning, the Grand Bahama International Airport in Freeport is under about 5 feet of water, so flights in and out are not possible.

Hurricane Dorian will begin to affect the U.S. Mainland in the coming hours, beginning on Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The storm is expected to graze the Florida Peninsula, ultimately making landfall somewhere in the Carolinas. Stay tuned for updates on the storm.