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Daughter’s six-week search for missing parents marked by miscommunication, false sightings, DNA samples • Asheville Watchdog

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avlwatchdog.org – SALLY KESTIN – 2024-12-04 06:00:00

Asheville Watchdog is bringing you the stories behind the staggering loss of life from Helene, the children, parents, grandparents, multiple generations of a single family, all gone in one of the worst natural disasters to hit the mountains of western North Carolina. This is the ninth installment.  

The sorrow and torment are sadly familiar by now: A daughter desperately searching for her missing parents only to discover they were never coming back.

Nola and Robert Ramsuer died when floodwaters overtook their Swannanoa riverside trailer in Tropical Storm Helene.

But for daughter Shalana Jordan, getting to that agonizing answer took six weeks and included multiple searches through mud-caked debris, repeated calls to aid agencies, false sightings from well-meaning strangers, and a bureaucratic labyrinth that often appeared inept at tracking the missing and the dead.

Read previous installments of The Lives We Lost.

The Ramsuers, both 70, were among the 43 officially lost in Buncombe County to the Sept. 27 storm.

For loved ones left behind, navigating a chaotic disaster even with help pouring in from across the U.S. can be frustratingly slow and painful.

For Jordan, 40, of Winston Salem, it meant days of scouring social media posts and helicopter footage for clues about her parents, sending friends and relatives to shelters to see if they were there, providing DNA samples not once but twice, and waiting six weeks for confirmation that remains found within 10 days of the storm were those of her mother and father.

Jordan, mother of two boys, Aiden, 8, and P.J., 9, had to juggle their school needs and her own chemotherapy for a genetic disorder while searching for answers.

Nola Ramsuer with her grandsons, P.J., 9, left, and Aiden, 8. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

Holding onto hope amid the wreckage

On the morning of the storm, Jordan texted with her mother as she usually did. Around 7:30 a.m., her mother reported the power had gone out.

“She said it, like, almost funny…‘It’ll come back on again later,’” Jordan said. “She stopped texting me around eight.”

Jordan assumed her mother had gone to work at her custodian’s job at the Black Mountain Neuro-Medical Treatment Center. Her father, a Vietnam War veteran who had been in declining health, still worked a couple of days a week in maintenance for Cracker Barrel.

Shalana Jordan scoured helicopter footage and found this aerial image showing the remnants of her parents’ trailer park, including their home, which she circled. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

When Jordan couldn’t reach them that night, she figured they’d gone to bed early. The next day, images of the destruction began appearing on social media.

“I messaged all my family in Asheville, thinking maybe they called one of them and were with them, or maybe they didn’t have their phones,” Jordan said. 

Over the next hours and days, she searched a Swannanoa Facebook page, scanning photos of water pickup and donation sites for any signs of her parents. She watched hours of helicopter video footage and finally spotted her parents’ trailer park on Avery Wood Drive. Many of the trailers were gone. 

Benjamin Larrabee, the Ramsuers’ next-door neighbor, recorded videos of the floodwater surging through the trailer park, sweeping up semi-tractor trailers and pushing them downstream past the Ramsuers’ home. 

“Man, the whole trailer just moved,” Larrabee can be heard saying on one video as the water carried two semis past the Ramsuers. “Oh man, I hope these guys are going to be all right.” 

One of the trucks eventually crashed into the Ramsuers’ trailer, ripping off one end, Jordan said.

(Editor’s note: This video contains profanity.) Neighbor Benjamin Larrabee captured semi-tractor trailers floating by the Ramsuers’ trailer, right. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

Inside, she said, the water came up to the hood above the stove; a couch had been lifted off the floor and landed on the kitchen counter.

Neither of her parents could swim. But their home was still standing.

Jordan held out hope that maybe they made it to a shelter but determining that proved no easy task.

“During all of the first three weeks, we were checking shelters,” Jordan said. “There weren’t any lists of who was in the shelters. I had to physically send people there while I was in Winston Salem.”

Neighbor Benjamin Larrabee took this photo of Robert Ramsuer during the flood, believed to be the last image of him alive, his daughter said. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

Jordan posted about her parents on social media and gave interviews to national media in hopes of generating leads. Her phone pinged non-stop with hopeful, but false tips.

“People message you and comment on your posts all day, every day, from six in the morning until 2 a.m. at night,” she said. “‘I think I saw them here. I think I saw them there.’”

Jordan made the two-hour trip to her parents’ home four times, traipsing through mud and debris outside and inside the trailer with relatives and her fiance, Edward Jordan. “The mud was so thick in one of the back bedrooms, I was like, what if they’re in here in the mud, and we’re walking over them?” she said.

Her own health made searching difficult. Jordan’s legs and ankles swell, and chemo leaves her weak and in pain, she said.

At one point, she injured her ankle in the remnants of the trailer. “I fell through the floor,” Jordan said, “because it was getting soft from all the mud and the moisture.”

Jordan called every government and aid agency she could think of to report her parents missing.

Part of the Ramsuers’ home was ripped off when a semi-tractor trailer floating in the floodwaters crashed into the trailer. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

“Nobody would take a description of them. No one would take photos. It was crazy,” she said. “I know that it was an unprecedented situation, but FEMA, [the American] Red Cross, like they do this every day. Disaster is their only job.”

An arduous wait for confirmation 

Sixteen days after the storm, Jordan said she received a call from a Buncombe sheriff’s executive asking for a description of the clothes her parents were wearing.

Three days later, “I got a call from the medical examiner in Raleigh saying that they think they found my parents,” Jordan said.

She did not know then, but death certificates completed later showed her mother’s body had been found Oct. 4, and her father’s Oct. 7, more than a week earlier.

“We were hunting and wasting resources this whole time,” Jordan said, “if we could have been allowed to identify bodies, or if someone had been in charge of missing persons, to say we recovered X, Y and Z bodies.

Shalana Jordan with her mother, Nola Ramsuer, and fiance, Edward Jordan. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

“How many resources did I waste that could have been used helping someone else or finding someone else because we had tons of community help, people searching on foot, cadaver dogs, people shoveling out mud for us?”

Dr. Craig Nelson at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in Raleigh told Jordan the bodies believed to be her parents still had to be transported to Raleigh for examination and confirmation, she said. 

Around the same time, the Buncombe Sheriff’s Office had been in contact with Jordan and sent a Winston Salem police officer to her home to collect DNA samples to match them against the remains.

The same day, about 20 minutes later, Nelson called to arrange to collect her DNA. Jordan told him, “They already came, and he was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Nelson said he would look into it and called back to say the first sample was headed to a Buncombe County lab, and results would take three to six weeks, Jordan said.

The Raleigh medical examiner’s lab could match the sample faster, in about a week, but she would need to provide a second round of DNA, “so more officers came and got samples,” Jordan said.

In early November, Nelson delivered the results.

“He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’” Jordan said. “My parents remains’ broke down too much during this process, and they couldn’t even get anything from their DNA samples.”

More samples were collected from the remains, and the medical examiner’s office conducted another round of testing. “We had to wait another week,” Jordan said.

She said Nelson “went above and beyond” and kept her updated daily. 

The medical examiner’s office did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

On Nov. 12, more than six weeks after the storm and five weeks after her parents’ bodies had been found, Jordan received official confirmation of their deaths.

By then, the family had already held a memorial service. Jordan said she did not want to wait with unpredictable winter weather approaching.

And she said she knew in her heart her parents were gone, especially after the discovery of a plastic bag inside their trailer with her mother’s purse, her father’s wallet, debit cards and mementos. She thinks they were planning an escape.

Also inside the bag: her mother’s cell phone, the same one she’d been texting and calling for days.

“She didn’t even have her phone,” Jordan said. “We were all just texting no one.”

Memorial brings unexpected costs, tributes

The Ramsuers’ funeral and cremation costs totaled more than $3,000 and included a “transport fee” to drive their remains from Raleigh to a funeral home in Swannanoa, Jordan said. “It’s $3 a mile to transport a body,” she said.

Cracker Barrel, her father’s employer, catered the memorial service and paid a portion of the costs, she said. The Red Cross paid the transport fee and other expenses.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to pay, she said, because her father was entitled to funeral benefits as a veteran, about $300. With community donations, Jordan said the family expects to be fully reimbursed for the funeral costs.

Jordan said she’s heard from many of her parents’ friends, neighbors and co-workers, “the only good thing out of all this,” she said. “Not a handful, not dozens, but hundreds of people.”

Robert Ramsuer, a Buncombe native, served in the U.S. Army. “He saw a lot of crazy stuff” in Vietnam and served two tours after the war, his daughter said.

She described him as a spitfire who always had a story to tell. He loved fishing and hunting.

“People messaged me saying, ‘Your dad taught me how to fish 40 years ago; your dad taught me martial arts 30 years ago,’” Jordan said.

Nola Ramsuer was “very soft spoken and sweet,” she said. She baked cakes for friends’ and coworkers’ birthdays and hosted Christmas for their extended family.

Nola and Robert Ramsuer with their daughter, Shalana, during a 1988 visit to Ghost Town, a Wild West-themed amusement park in Maggie Valley. // Courtesy of Shalana Jordan

One former coworker told Jordan how he’d talked to her mother about the many medications he was taking for lupus, an autoimmune disorder Jordan also has. Her mother went online and researched alternatives “and sent him these printouts of holistic things he could try to be able to get off all the medication,” Jordan said.

‘Life is so fragile’ 

Jordan recently collected her parents’ ashes from the Penland Family Funeral Home in Swannanoa. She said she purchased two memorial boxes, each a size large accommodating the remains of a 300-pound person, more than enough for her 140-pound father and 110-pound mother.

But Jordan said a funeral home representative informed her that her mother had been found in the mud. 

He said, “‘We tried to remove as much material from her as we could, but there still was a lot mixed in, so all of her doesn’t fit inside of the box,’” Jordan said.

She said she received two boxes with her mother’s remains. 

Funeral home representatives did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Jordan said that while her father had been ill, she expected to have another 20 or 30 years with her mother, who came from a family in which women lived well into their 90s, one making it to 104.

“I thought I had more time,” Jordan posted on Facebook. “Life is so fragile and can be gone in an instant.”


Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Email skestin@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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Helene: Death toll 107 in North Carolina, 236 in seven states | North Carolina

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www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-03 14:11:00

(The Center Square) – Hurricane Helene’s death toll in North Carolina has grown to 107 and is 236 across seven states.

Gov. Josh Stein shared news of a death in the Avery County community of Newland. The wife of a couple camping was among those who died in earlier confirmations; the husband’s death was added on Thursday after his body was found.

The governor said the couple was camping on the last weekend of September when the storm hit.

This weekend marks the beginning of the 28th week of recovery. Damage is estimated at $60 billion.

Helene is arguably the worst natural disaster in state history. Hurricanes Floyd in 1999 and Hazel in 1954 have their place, as does Asheville’s Great Flood of 1916. Comparison is not apples to apples.

Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Dekle Beach, Fla., on Sept. 26. It was expected to come north to the Appalachian Mountains; however, the rainfall total from its dissipation there exceeded all forecasts.

Some places got more than 30 inches, most were at 24 or more. Due to terrain, water often rushed before it pooled and flooded – very unlike the flooding that happens in the coastal plains.

AccuWeather said rainfall totals were 32.51 inches in Jeter Mountain, 31.36 inches in Busick, and 26.65 inches in Hughes.

Forty-two died in Buncombe County, 11 in Yancey and 10 in Henderson.

Respective state officials say 49 were killed in South Carolina, 34 in Georgia, 25 in Florida, 18 in Tennessee, two in Virginia and one in Indiana.

Numbers were confirmed by The Center Square based on information supplied by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services; South Carolina Department of Public Safety; Georgia Emergency Management Agency; Florida Department of Law Enforcement; Tennessee Emergency Management Agency; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin; and the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office in Indiana.

Helene is the fourth most deadly hurricane from the Atlantic Basin in the last three-quarters of a century. Only Katrina (2005, deaths 1,392), Audrey (1957, deaths 416) and Camille (1969, deaths 256) killed more people.

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Analysis: ‘Valley’ of AI journey risks human foundational, unique traits | National

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www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-02 14:21:00

(The Center Square) – Minority benefit against the majority giving up “agency, creativity, decision-making and other vital skills” in what is described as a valley of an artificial intelligence journey is likely in the next few years, says one voice among hundreds in a report from Elon University.

John M. Stuart’s full-length essay, one of 200 such responses in “Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?,” speaks to the potential problems foreseen as artificial intelligence continues to be incorporated into everyday life by many at varying levels from professional to personal to just plain curious. The report authored by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie of Elon’s Imagining the Digital Future Center says “the fragile future of some foundational and unique traits” found only in humans is a concern for 6 in 10.

“I fear – the time being – that while there will be a growing minority benefitting ever more significantly with these tools, most people will continue to give up agency, creativity, decision-making and other vital skills to these still-primitive AIs and the tools will remain too centralized and locked down with interfaces that are simply out of our personal control as citizens,” writes Smart, a self-billed global futurist, foresight consultant, entrepreneur and CEO of Foresight University. “I fear we’re still walking into an adaptive valley in which things continue to get worse before they get better. Looking ahead past the next decade, I can imagine a world in which open-source personal AIs are trustworthy and human-centered.

“Many political reforms will reempower our middle class and greatly improve rights and autonomy for all humans, whether or not they are going through life with PAIs. I would bet the vast majority of us will consider ourselves joined at the hip to our digital twins once they become useful enough. I hope we have the courage, vision and discipline to get through this AI valley as quickly and humanely as we can.”

Among the ideas by 2035 from the essays, Paul Saffo offered, “The first multi-trillion-dollar corporation will employ no humans except legally required executives and board, have no offices, own no property and operate entirely through AI and automated systems.”

Saffo is a futurist and technology forecaster in the Silicon Valley of California, and a consulting professor at the School of Engineering at Stanford.

In another, Vint Cerf wrote, “We may find it hard to distinguish between artificial personalities and the real ones. That may result in a search for reliable proof of humanity so that we and bots can tell the difference.”

Cerf is generally known as one of the “fathers of the internet” alongside Robert Kahn and for the internet protocol suite, colloquially known as TCP/IP.

Working alongside the well-respected Elon University Poll, the survey asked, “What might be the magnitude of overall change in the next decade in people’s native operating systems and operations as we more broadly adapt to and use advanced AIs by 2035? From five choices, 61% said considerable (deep and meaningful change 38%) and dramatic (fundamental, revolutionary change 23%) and another 31% said moderate and noticeable, meaning clear and distinct.

Only 5% said minor change and 3% no noticeable change.

“This report is a revealing and provocative declaration to the profound depth of change people are undergoing – often without really noticing at all – as we adapt to deeper uses of advancing AI technology,” Anderson said. “Collectively, these experts are calling on humanity to think intentionally and carefully, taking wise actions now, so we do not sleepwalk into an AI future that we never intended and do not want.”

In another question, respondents answered whether artificial intelligence and related technologies are likely to change the essence of being human. Fifty percent said changes were equally better and worse, 23% said mostly for the worse, and 16% said mostly for the better.

The analysis predicted change mostly negative in nine areas: social and emotional intelligence; capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex concepts; trust in widely shared values and norms; confidence in their native abilities; empathy and application of moral judgment; mental well-being; sense of agency; sense of identity and purpose; and metacognition.

Mostly positive, the report says, are curiosity and capacity to learn; decision-making and problem-solving; and innovative thinking and creativity.

Anderson and Rainie and those working on the analysis did not use large language models for writing and editing, or in analysis of the quantitative data for the qualitative essays. Authors said there was brief experimentation and human realization “there were serious flaws and inaccuracies.” The report says 223 of 301 who responded did so “fully generated out of my own mind, with no LLM assistance.”

Results were gathered between Dec. 27 and Feb. 1.

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Trump urged to reconsider order gutting agency that gives grants to libraries, museums

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ncnewsline.com – Shauneen Miranda – 2025-04-02 13:00:00

SUMMARY: On March 14, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dramatically reduce funding for seven federal agencies, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which awarded $266.7 million in 2024. The order aims to eliminate non-essential functions and cut agency personnel to legal minimums. The move sparked backlash from library and museum organizations, warning it would severely impact early literacy programs, internet access, job assistance, and community services. Critics urged Congress to intervene, while the administration framed the cuts as part of efforts to reduce government waste under the U.S. DOGE Service initiative led by Elon Musk. 

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