Severe storms kill man in Des Moines as Midwest threat spreads

A deadly line of storms kept moving through the Midwest Thursday, on the third day of a broad outbreak that left more than 120 million people in the path of potentially dangerous weather. In Des Moines, a 54-year-old man was killed when a tree broke apart and fell on him at a homeless encampment, a stark reminder of how fast the system turned violent before sunrise.

First responders were dispatched just before 8 a.m. to the 3300 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, where they found the man critically injured after being struck by the falling tree. He died at the scene. Des Moines police and the Polk County Medical Examiner’s Office are investigating.

Neighbors said they knew the victim as “Billy” and said he lived in the encampment with his fiancée. One neighbor said he called 911 after finding the tree down behind the tent, adding a human face to a storm that had already begun shredding neighborhoods, power lines and streets across Polk County.

Emergency officials reported numerous downed trees and localized flash flooding as the storms pushed through the metro area. Roughly 7,000 customers were without power at the height of the morning outage. Northern parts of Polk County were under a tornado warning, and a top wind gust of 54 mph was recorded in the Des Moines area Thursday morning.

The Des Moines death came as the storm system stretched across a huge swath of the country. Severe weather threats earlier in the week put more than 40 million people from Kansas City to Chicago in the path of damaging winds, large hail, possible tornadoes and flash flooding. The same sequence of storms was expected to send a destructive storm complex from Iowa into Wisconsin Thursday morning, with major cities including Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Madison, Springfield, Omaha and Wichita all facing risk from repeated rounds of thunderstorms.

The outbreak had already shown its force before it reached Iowa. An EF-1 tornado in Freeland, Michigan, damaged 40 homes and businesses earlier in the week, underscoring how the system had been producing damage for days rather than hours. Forecasters warned that the persistence of the threat, combined with strong winds and flooding rain, would keep testing local preparedness across the Midwest as the storm track shifted east and north.