Young boy seriously injured from tree crashing into Cherryvale mobile home during Friday storm

***UPDATE: As of Saturday, April 20, the child had been transported to a Columbia area hosptial and was in stable but critical condition.

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A young boy was seriously injured Friday afternoon as severe thunderstorms ripe for tornadoes ripped through Sumter County.

The 3-year-old boy was sitting on a couch in a Burgess Glen Mobile Home park residence when a massive pine tree crashed through the roof into the room where he was, according to Adrienne Sarvis, public information officer for the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office.

Sumter Fire Department Battalion Chief Joey Duggan said firefighters used saws to cut away the roof, which had pinned the child down, trapping him inside the house on Blanche Road.

“When we were able to actually extract him from the house, he was unconscious and unresponsive,” Duggan said.

The boy was rushed to Prisma Health Tuomey Hospital with serious injuries.

Duggan said there were adults home at the time of the storm and when the tree came through the roof, but first responders did not get a chance to talk to them or figure out their relation to the boy because they followed the ambulance to the hospital.

The incident happened about 2:45 p.m. as parts of Sumter were under a tornado warning, especially in the western, Cherryvale area of the county. Dispatchers and first responders were busy during the storm attending to the Blanche Road accident while getting calls about other trees and power lines down throughout Sumter.

Clarendon County also received calls about downed trees and power lines.

The line of storms killed an 8-year-old girl in Florida before threatening the Carolinas and Virginia. A tree fell onto a house in Woodville, Florida, south of Tallahassee, killing the girl and injuring a 12-year-old boy, according to The Associated Press.

The same storm system was blamed for the deaths a day earlier of a woman in Alabama and three people in Mississippi, including two drivers and a man who died after a tree trunk rolled onto him while he was helping cut a tree that fell on a house.