All day, the tall, leafy tree had been a source of shade and comfort for Amber Escudero-Kontostathis.
In the 90-degree heat, he had spent hours canvassing tourists outside the White House for donations to help refugees in Ukraine, his family said. As he finished his shift on Thursday last week, a storm gathered overhead, thick with clouds, rain and thunder.
That Thursday was his 28th birthday, his family said. So while Amber waited for her husband to pick her up for a celebratory dinner, she again sought shelter in the same tree, huddling with three others under its outstretched branches, according to her family and authorities .
Three people died after a lightning strike near the White House on Thursday
One of them was Brooks Lambertson, a young and rising vice president of the bank from Los Angeles. There was Donna Mueller, 75, a retired teacher, and her husband James Mueller, 76, who came. from Wisconsin to Washington to celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary. And there was Amber, a young woman from California whose travels through the Middle East teaching English had sparked a desire. to help those affected by war and poverty in this region.
They they were strangers brought to that precise spot on the east side of Lafayette Square, at that precise moment for various reasons: business, vacation, passion to help.
Shortly before 7 p.m., was in that place – under a A leafy tree about 100 feet from a statue of President Andrew Jackson—that lightning struck.
Experts recorded a lightning in the area like six individual jolts of electricity hitting the same spot in the space of half a second. If the electricity struck the tree first, experts said, it would have sent hundreds of millions of volts coursing through it before entering and over the bodies of those gathered beneath it.
“It shook the whole area,” an eyewitness later explained. “Literally like a bomb going off, that’s what it sounded like.”
the strike left all four seriously injured. The Secret Service and the US Parks Police, who keep the park in front of the White House under constant patrol, rushed to help.
On Friday morning, police announced that the elderly Wisconsin couple had died. Later that night, the Los Angeles banker also died, police said.
Amber would be the sole survivor.
What happens when lightning strikes and how to stay safe
The lightning stopped Amber’s heart, said her brother Robert F. Escudero. Two nurses, who were visiting the White House on vacation and saw the Secret Service running to help, immediately began CPR on him and managed to restore his pulse, he said.
The lightning caused severe burns on the left side of his body and arm, his family said. This is the side where her bag went, with the iPad she used to sign people up for refugee donations.
Her parents rushed to Washington from California, and her mother has documented her struggle to recover on Facebook. The lightning left Amber struggling at first to breathe, her mother, Julie Escudero, wrote. But on Friday, nurses were able to take her off the ventilator.
The lightning also damaged his short-term memory. She was scared and confused about what happened to her. “We definitely don’t want him to remember the incident right now,” his mother wrote on Facebook. But every time he wakes up, his mother wrote, he asks what happened to him, will he die and will he be able to walk? His family said one thing he was particularly concerned about was his work raising funds for refugees.
He had majored in international studies in college and traveled to Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, according to his brother and his job profile. She spent a year teaching English in Jordan and soon after began raising funds for non-profit organizations. He began working in Washington last year for a group called Threshold Giving and focused particularly on fundraising for the International Rescue Committee, a global relief agency.
“The first thing he said to me when we FaceTimed was, ‘I need to go back to work on Saturday,'” Robert Escudero said. “She’s worried about raising money for refugee children. She asked me, ‘Who’s going to get the money if I’m not there?'”
A friend started a GoFundMe page to raise money for his medical bills. So her brother said he promised Amber he would work with Threshold Giving in the coming days to also create a way for people who learn about her survival story to donate to the refugees.
The one thing her family still hasn’t discussed with her is the fate of the others who were with her that night under the tree.
“She’s starting to realize there were others and she wants to know how they’re doing and what she did wrong,” her mother said in a Facebook post on Sunday. “She cares so much about others that it will be difficult for her.”
On Sunday, many signs of the deadly lightning strike were still visible in Lafayette Square.
One tree had streaks of charred bark, cracks and a large crack in the main trunk where the wood remained deformed like a bruise. People passing through Lafayette Square stopped at the tree to look at the scars.
One of them was Cal Vargas, a childhood friend of Lambertson, who died. She brought a wreath and a bouquet of white flowers to place at the base of the tree. Vargas and Lambertson were friends since kindergarten and grew up together in Folsom, California, where they shared a passion for sports and the Sacramento Kings.
“He was an incredible individual,” Vargas said quietly. “He always had a smile on his face, he always looked on the bright side of things.”
Before the The day the lightning struck, Lambertson, 29, had arrived in Washington on a business trip from Los Angeles. He was passing the time before a dinner reservation when he got caught in the storm, Vargas said.
In a phone interview, Lambertson’s father, whom The Washington Post is not identifying by name to protect his privacy, said his son was “probably the best human being I know.” She said her son’s kindness, generosity and humility “showed in everything he did, in all his interactions with people.”
He worked at City National Bank as a vice president managing the company’s sponsorships. He had done marketing for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, according to a statement from the bank.
The elderly Wisconsin couple who also died that day were celebrating their 56th wedding anniversary, family members said.
Donna Mueller, 75, and her husband, James Mueller, 76, had been high school sweethearts before they married. James had owned a drywall business for decades while his wife worked as a teacher, according to one of his daughters-in-law, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy.
The couple lived in Janesville, Wis., about 70 miles west of Milwaukee, and had five grown children, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. “They would both do anything for their family and friends,” the family said in a statement.
The odds of someone being killed by lightning are extremely rare. In the past decade, only an average of 23 people have died each year in the United States.
Multiple fatalities are even rarer. Before last week’s strike, the last time three people died in a single incident was more than 18 years ago on June 27, 2004, when three people in Georgia were run over by trees at Bedford Dam State Park, said John Jensenius, National Radiation Safety Council specialist.
Because lightning tends to strike tall objects, experts warn that taking shelter under a tree during a storm is very dangerous. When a tree is struck by an electrical charge, the tree’s moisture and sap easily conduct electricity, carrying it to the ground around the tree, experts say.
“When lightning strikes a tree, the charge doesn’t penetrate deep into the ground, but spreads across the surface of the ground,” Jensenius said. “This makes the entire area around a tree dangerous, and anyone under or near a tree vulnerable.”
For that and other reasons, Amber’s survival felt miraculous, her family said. If it hadn’t happened right in front of the White House where there are Secret Service agents. If only the two nurses who resuscitated her hadn’t been on vacation and seen what was happening.
On Saturday night, Amber was finally able to take a few steps on her own, her family said. She was supposed to start a master’s program in international relations this fall at Johns Hopkins University, the latest step in her work to try to help refugees and those suffering abroad.
“She’s an amazing, strong-willed person. And she has a heart for others,” her brother said. “So the goal now is to get her walking again when classes start in a few weeks.”
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.