Charles Dean loved living in his South Carolina neighborhood, with its manicured lawns and towering trees. It reminded him of his childhood growing up in a family that has run a lumber business since the early 1900s.
It was one of those giant trees that ended up killing him when Hurricane Helene whipped through Greenville last week and uprooted a red oak that crashed into his apartment.
But rather than discarding the tree, his relatives plan to use some of its wood to craft a beautiful bench, table, or other pieces of furniture and donate them to one of the drug recovery centers where Charles touched many lives, brother Matthew Dean said.
“Charles helped a lot of people who were alcoholics and drug addicts, and if there is something we can get out of this, is that there’s always hope. There is always hope,” he said.
Days of rain saturated the ground, and as the storm reached the Southeast it whipped up strong winds that uprooted trees and utility poles throughout the region.