Families shattered by tornadoes in Louisiana and Mississippi

KEITHVILLE, La. (AP) — A storm system that spawned dozens of reported tornadoes from east Texas to the Florida Panhandle was all but done with the South on Thursday after killing at least three people and uprooting families across Louisiana, where some homes were blown into pieces.

Elsewhere, heavy snow and high winds meant more blizzards in the northern Midwest from the Dakotas through Michigan, with ice and snow causing trouble in places from the Appalachians through New England.

The National Weather Service can take days to confirm whether destructive winds were in fact tornadoes, but the impact was clear in places like Caddo Parish, Louisiana, where a man went out for groceries and returned to discover his mobile home was gone, and with it, his wife and son.

“You go to search a house and the house isn’t even there, so where do you search?” Gov. John Bel Edwards said as he toured the mile-long (1.6-kilometer) path of destruction in rural Keithville, south of Shreveport.

The body of 8-year-old Nikolus Little was found in the woods. The body of his mother, Yoshiko A. Smith, 30, was discovered later, under storm debris. “He just went to go shopping for his family, came home and the house was gone,” Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Sgt. Casey Jones said.

Another Keithville man, William Walls, said a tornado picked up his home and tossed it into his brother’s house next door. Videos he posted on Facebook show the shredded remains.

“This is my house,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Walls said in the videos that he was standing on the back porch of his brother’s home and the wind blew the door shut. He couldn’t get inside and he ended up standing out there as the tornado came right over the house, he said.

“I was standing on that back porch. I couldn’t get in the house, when that tree fell...