Chattanooga family hopes to find keepsake military quilt blown away by tornado

Staff photo by Troy Stolt / A quilt made to honor Desert Storm veteran Larry Lockmiller lies amid debris on Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in the Hickory Valley neighborhood of East Brainerd, Tenn. Lockmiller's wife, Beulah, contacted the Times Free Press after seeing this photo and said she has not seen the quilt since it was carried off from her home on Camelot Lane by an EF3 tornado that ripped through the area late on the evening of April 12. The quilt is a prized family keepsake and she hopes someone in the community knows where it is.
Staff photo by Troy Stolt / A quilt made to honor Desert Storm veteran Larry Lockmiller lies amid debris on Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in the Hickory Valley neighborhood of East Brainerd, Tenn. Lockmiller's wife, Beulah, contacted the Times Free Press after seeing this photo and said she has not seen the quilt since it was carried off from her home on Camelot Lane by an EF3 tornado that ripped through the area late on the evening of April 12. The quilt is a prized family keepsake and she hopes someone in the community knows where it is.

Beulah Lockmiller kept her husband's military quilt stored in a protective plastic pouch inside her dresser, but that protection was no match for Easter Sunday's EF3 tornado, so she's asking for the public's help in locating the quilt.

Her husband, Larry Lockmiller, died about 10 years ago. He was a retired University of Tennessee at Chattanooga police lieutenant, and before that, he had been deployed to Desert Storm in 1991 while serving in the National Guard.

When he came back from deployment, his sister-in-law's aunt, who died about four years ago, made him a quilt to honor his service. It featured Larry Lockmiller's military patches and flags of the different countries he had been to while enlisted, as well as a poem that the serviceman had written while deployed. It conveyed what he wanted to say to his family if he were to die.

Beulah Lockmiller thinks she may still have a copy of the poem, though it could have been lost in the tornado.

"It's special to my mom," Beulah Lockmiller's daughter, Gretchen Davis, said.

When the tornado hit on the night of April 12, "her whole bedroom blew away," Davis said of her mother's house.

"Furniture, beds, walls, there was nothing even in that room itself when we got to it," Davis said.

Beulah Lockmiller sheltered in a hallway outside the master bedroom as the tornado ripped through her house. She escaped major injuries, but her knee was hurt by flying debris.

Davis, who lives not far from her mother, was on the phone with her before the tornado hit.

"I couldn't hear her, and then she told me that she couldn't move and for me to pray for her," Davis said. "Then I didn't hear her again for two or three minutes and then finally I heard her again, and she said she's going to try to walk toward the front door if we could come down there and get her."

Davis' husband picked her up and drove her back to their house, which sustained minimal damage and is still livable.

But they're still missing the quilt.

Times Free Press photographer Troy Stolt photographed the quilt on April 14 while documenting the damage in the Drake Forest neighborhood. It wasn't far from Beulah Lockmiller's house, but Stolt had no idea who the quilt belonged to. After the family saw the photo, they contacted Stolt - who helped them find the location, but the quilt was no longer there.

"I would just love to see it returned to my mom," Davis said. "It's very important to her because it was so important to my dad. My dad was very proud of it, and he was proud that [the aunt] had made it and people that would come over, he would show it to [them] and it just meant a lot to him that [the aunt] had taken that much time to do something for him.

"All the other things in her home we can definitely replace, but the the quilt was special and handmade and one of a kind and sentimental," she said.

The family is offering a $200 reward for anyone who returns the quilt.

Contact Rosana Hughes at rhughes@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327 with tips or story ideas. Follow her on Twitter @Hughes Rosana.

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