A Retirement Community Prepared for a Hurricane. Tornadoes Came Instead.

Hurricane Milton’s death toll was highest far from the coast where it made landfall, in a retirement community where few were braced for destructive tornadoes.

Victor Linero was watching coverage of Hurricane Milton’s churn toward Florida when, suddenly, he saw a live video of a tornado near his grandfather’s home — hours before the hurricane was supposed to hit on the opposite side of the state.

In a panic, Mr. Linero warned his grandfather over the phone that he needed to take cover.

“I was screaming, ‘Papi, get shelter now!’” recalled Mr. Linero, 26, who was raised by grandfather. “And then I start hearing, ‘Oh my God. Ahh!’”

He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, let out a final scream. Then the other end of the line went silent.

By the time it was over, what looked to be two tornadoes had plowed through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Mr. Alonso lived. They had decimated mobile homes, tossed trucks aside and toppled trees, all while Hurricane Milton was nearly 200 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the end, Mr. Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend and four other people were dead. Roughly 125 houses, all of them mobile homes, were destroyed. It was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing ironies: that an area on the opposite coast from where the brunt of the hurricane hit saw more deaths than any other single spot during the storm.

“We were not in an evacuation area,” Anita Perrotta, who lives in the community with her husband, said as she described the two of them hiding in their home at Spanish Lakes while the tornado threw debris against it.

“We really didn’t get damage from the actual hurricane when it came through later,” she said. “All the damage was done by these tornadoes.”

It is not rare for a hurricane to generate tornadoes as its outer bands come ashore, but the number and intensity of the ones on Wednesday took many by surprise. They occurred hours before the hurricane’s damaging winds were expected to arrive, forcing residents to scramble into homes, gas stations and hotel lobbies — wherever they could find shelter at the last minute.

In the aftermath of the storm, residents said they had assumed that Milton’s most ferocious effects would be on the other side of the state, where the storm was barreling in from the Gulf of Mexico.

At Spanish Lakes, where both snowbirds and full-timers live a typical Florida retirement life of bocce ball and bingo, residents had not been immune to warnings about the impending storm, even on the Atlantic Coast. The 1,285 houses in the community are a mix of newer, concrete houses that can often withstand storms and mobile homes, which are vulnerable.

For days, residents had been keeping a close eye on Hurricane Milton’s track. But the worst of the wind and rain had seemed destined to hit elsewhere.

As tornadoes began swirling around the state, well ahead of the hurricane’s path, panicked family members began checking on relatives who lived at Spanish Lakes.

Mr. Alonso was one of those most at risk because he lived in a mobile home. He had moved there after serving in the U.S. Army and working for the Postal Service for more than three decades. He shared his life there with his motorcycle, his two dogs — he had a tattoo of one, a Rottweiler — and his girlfriend, Mary Grace Viramontez.

Ms. Viramontez had been a social worker in southwest Detroit for much of her life, according to her son, Adam Torres, who said she had helped young people who were facing homelessness and other challenges.

Mr. Linero said he believes that the tornado he saw on the live video was the same one that tore through his grandfather’s community moments later. When he heard his grandfather scream, he said, he already felt in his heart that he had not survived.

He got in a car and sped the 45 miles down Interstate 95 to Spanish Lakes. When he found his grandfather’s trailer, it was not where he remembered. The tornado had pushed it 100 feet away, leaving just the foundation.

“I knew he was gone, but I needed to say goodbye,” Mr. Linero said. “I wanted to be there for him because that’s what he was for me.”

Mr. Alonso and Ms. Viramontez were not the only victims that day.

Brandi Smith said she had spoken earlier on Wednesday to her mother, Debbie Kennedy, 66, a retired nursing home custodian who had moved to Spanish Lakes from upstate New York in March.

She said her mother had been confident that she was safe in her mobile home. If things got worse, she told her daughter, she knew where to go: A school a few miles down the road had been turned into a shelter.

“But they were still hours ahead of the storm,” Ms. Smith said. “It wasn’t a worry."

Then suddenly she noticed that the text messages she was sending to her mother were no longer being delivered. She began searching online for information, connecting with dozens of people. Someone offered to go to a nearby hospital to show the staff a picture of her mother.

On Thursday morning, rescuers found Ms. Kennedy’s body in the neighborhood.

Ms. Smith said her mother was a loving mother and grandmother who was known in the small town of Union Springs, N.Y., for her extravagant Halloween decorations. And she always told her daughter that she wanted to be buried next to her husband, who died in 2021, joking that she would haunt her unless it happened.

Since Ms. Kennedy’s death, that has been her daughter’s primary focus: bringing her mother home to be buried.

John Brennan, the community manager at Spanish Lakes, said the mobile homes destroyed represented about 10 percent of the housing in the community. But even some of those who live in the sturdier concrete structures said they had felt afraid for their lives as the tornadoes passed through.

“It was extremely scary,” said Pat Pinette, 70, describing how the walls of her home began to vibrate as the tornado approached. “We thought our cement block wall was going to cave in on us.”

Ms. Pinette said the tornado sounded like a freight train and just kept getting louder until her and her husband decided they should get to their laundry room. But the tornado quickly moved past their street. They did not even have time to shut the door of the laundry room before it was over.

She said her husband’s aunt was knocked over by the tornado’s winds, splitting open an incision from a recent surgery. And one of her cousins, Frank Gormley, was in his house, sitting in a recliner, when it was essentially blown away by the tornado.

“Next thing you know, he was laying on somebody’s roof,” said Mr. Gormley’s brother, Joe.

“His neighbors told me they would take a picture of his house if there was rubble to show me, but there’s not even rubble left,” Joe Gormley said. “Some of these houses were lifted up and turned on their side. Some, the walls were blown down, some the roofs. His was just totally gone.”

Frank Gormley was still in the hospital on Friday afternoon, awaiting surgery on his hand, but was otherwise not seriously injured. “He’s so bruised up, they’re worried about blood clots,” his brother said.

After the tornadoes passed, a lengthy search-and-rescue effort began. Officers went from house to house, spray-painting a large, red “X” on the houses they had already cleared. Not all of the victims have been publicly identified.

The magnitude of the destruction in the retirement community meant that some people were left in the dark about the fates of their family members for more than a day.

Kelli King-Wolfcale spent all of Thursday searching for her 84-year-old mother, Sandra MacDonald, who lived on Montoya Way, one of several hard-hit streets in the neighborhood. Finally, on Thursday evening, she got the news: Her mother had not survived.

Like many of those left after the storm, her grief was mixed with a sense of disbelief. “No one knew anything like this was going to happen,” she said.

Annie Correal contributed reporting and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

More on Hurricane Milton

• Falsehoods Disrupt Recovery: Experts warn that weather-related disinformation can rapidly escalate into real-world risks and distract from aid.
• What It Was Like in the Eye: Here’s our reporter’s account of a harrowing night in Sarasota, Fla. — different from anything she has experienced as a native of New England.
• Over 3 Million Without Power: Downed power lines and scattered debris caused widespread power outages in Florida that may prove difficult for utility companies to repair.
• Would His Houseboat Survive?: A man’s boat had survived several storms the last three years. But after Milton swept through, he wasn’t sure he would have a home to return to.
• Mental Health Harms: Research shows that experiencing repeated disasters makes people more vulnerable to mental health issues, and prolongs the time it takes to recover.