Lloyd Neck couple's slumber unencumbered after oak crashes into bedroom

As Ginger and Peter Murphy slept Wednesday night in their Lloyd Neck home, a waterlogged oak tree outside proved no match against relentless rain.

The uprooted oak came crashing through the ceiling of the couple's bedroom, a casualty of a historic storm that lashed Long Island's North Shore with especially powerful force.

Their son, Mark, heard the earsplitting sound of the tree coming through the roof, before it careened past the attic, coming to a rest less than five feet from his parents' bed.

They somehow slept through the noise, and a torn-open ceiling, but the banging on their bedroom door by Mark Murphy finally rousted them. That's the moment the couple, both 82, saw how close they came to something far worse than a ceiling destroyed.

"We fell asleep and the tree fell down and we didn’t wake up," Peter Murphy said. "Mark didn’t know if we were alive. We woke up and realized we were in the bed and we got out."

On Thursday morning, with the storm mercifully a memory, the Murphys walked among chunks of soggy roof, oak branches and exposed insulation, marveling at their good fortune.

"It is a miracle," Peter Murphy said. "Our options were death and we would have gone to heaven."

They were still without power Thursday, but thanks to a generator, didn't miss out on their morning coffee.

"Last night we were good sleepers. It was like looking at a dream you had a tree in front of you. What’s this tree doing here?" Ginger Murphy said. "I didn’t realize how close it was, how close we were to being killed."

When Mark Murphy first heard the tree hitting the roof, he thought it was a tornado. He also thought of his parents. Murphy called out to them. He called out a second time, and then a third. Until they finally answered to let him know they were OK, Murphy feared his parents were dead.

The collapsed ceiling meant Murphy had to break through to the bedroom. Murphy said he saw the tree, looked up, and rain was pouring through the roof.

"If it was 10 more feet it would have killed them," Murphy said of his mom and dad's close call. "It was definitely divine intervention. I thought they were dead, that’s it. I planned to cut the side of the wall out and they said they were fine and actually slept through it."

The National Weather Service was reviewing damage from the storm Thursday and had not ordered a survey of tornadoes in the region.

From Huntington to Northport, the North Shore continued under a tornado warning for about 45 minutes Wednesday night. No tornado was spotted in the area, although several residents in Lloyd Neck still insist one swept through their neighborhoods.

"We’re going through the process of whether it was a tornado or not. There’s no indication a tornado hit. Right now, it’s straight line winds," said Dominic Ramunni, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Upton. "There was not a ground observation, but the Doppler radar showed the ingredients were there for a tornado to reach the ground or conditions for an imminent tornado to form."

The howling winds just before midnight sheared off the tops of trees and ripped others from their roots, sending them tumbling into homes.

Al Teklits, 49, of Lloyd Neck, said he woke up his 10-year-old son and stayed downstairs while a tree fell on his roof and tore the electric box off the side of his house. He stared at the fallen debris from his backyard Thursday and the damage to at least six other homes off Fiddlers Green Drive next to Caumsett State Park.

"This has to be a tornado," Teklits said. "What I heard was pure insanity. I got my son off the second floor and all hell broke lose. It was like two minutes of whirling and I heard the wind howling."

It could have been just another Long Island thunderstorm, said others in Teklits' neighborhood, until it wasn't.

"It was a tornado," said his neighbor Chris Tizzano, 46. "We had no clue it was coming. I just thought it was going to storm a bit."

Janet Lagarenne, 63, said she was sitting in her dining room in the Fiddlers Green Drive neighborhood when she got the tornado warning and rushed downstairs.

"Everything happened within a minute. The power went out, I lit a candle and heard this whirling sound," she said. "As we were going down the steps, we heard ‘boom boom boom,’ and that was the tree hitting our house. For the rest of the night, every 10 to 15 minutes, we heard wind and rain and things crashing on the house. We stayed downstairs all night."

Lagarenne, who grew up in Illinois, said the storm was consistent with a tornado’s intensity.

She has lived on Long Island for 30 years and has learned to brace for storms and hurricanes, but not a tornado warning.

"With a hurricane you have a lot of time to prepare but tornadoes are spontaneous," she said. "There’s no doubt it was a tornado. It sounded like it and the narrow path of destruction looks like what happened here."