Up until the moment Helene took her life, this NC mom was watching out for her loved ones
The moment Jamie and Melissa Guinn laid eyes on the house — nestled on the edge of the tiny Avery County town of Minneapolis, N.C. — they adored it.
Two stories, about 1,900 square feet, built in the late ’80s but with cedar siding in a style that made it look even older and more rustic. Almost like a cabin, they thought.
On top of that, the house’s surroundings were heavenly: the North Toe River babbled up at the front deck from the other side of Highway 19E; on multiple sides there were dense thickets of lush, tall, green trees; and out back was a very steep, very tall hill, which made it seem as if the home was built right into the side of a mountain.
They weren’t at first sure they would get approved to buy it. Jamie, a packing supervisor at Baxter Healthcare’s manufacturing plant, and Melissa — then a sub-assembly operator, at Baxter — had four other mouths to feed and were at the time living in an apartment in Marion in neighboring McDowell County.
But upon falling in love with the house, the couple couldn’t stop fantasizing about how they would make it their own if everything went smoothly with the offer.
And when everything did, when they were handed the keys, Jamie and Melissa felt like they had since the day they met.
They felt like the luckiest people in the world.
“We both said that we never thought we would have a house that nice in our life. She was so happy to have it,” Jamie says, by phone, from a bed at Cannon Memorial Hospital in Linville, with members of Melissa’s family gathered around him.
Then he briefly falls silent.
At the time of the conversation, on Thursday night, it’s been not even a week since Hurricane Helene raged across the sky over Western North Carolina. Not even a week since the storm triggered a series of landslides and mudslides that knocked the couple’s beloved home off its foundation. Not even a week since he suddenly, violently lost the 41-year-old woman of his dreams.
The father of their 8-year-old son River and stepfather to her older boys takes a deep, shaky breath. Takes a few seconds to compose himself. There are things he’s open to sharing about the tragic way Melissa died.
First, however, he wants to talk about the beautiful ways she lived.
Enamored by everything about her
Melissa met Jamie at Baxter when she was still married to her first husband, with whom she’d had three sons.
After her divorce, Jamie was slow to make a move. So she had to make her own, marching up to him while he was sitting in the cafeteria during a power outage — and plopping right down in his lap. The ice broken, he was able to work up the courage to walk her out at the end of that night. They started falling in love on the spot, as they chatted and flirted through the window of her silver Dodge Durango.
It escalated quickly.
He was enamored by everything about her. The intense love she had for her little boys, Brandon, Sebastian and Ethan. The ability to pull off camouflage clothes and mud-covered boots one minute, a fancy girly-girl dress the next. That fearlessness. That contagious laugh.
Those eyes, and the way they looked (as her younger sister Elizabeth describes them) like the color of honey in a jar when it’s held up to the sunlight.
They spent years dating before he formally proposed ... but leading up to that day, he informally popped the question over and over — with Ring Pops, or little black-plastic spider rings (because she loved Halloween), or other assorted toy rings he’d pull out of vending machines near the fronts of stores they shopped at.
Jamie would drop to a knee while holding his 25-cent offering and wearing a silly grin; she’d just laugh and wave him off.
You have to find a better way to propose, Melissa would tell him, every time.
Finally, on Halloween in 2013, he did it for real, secretly taking the day off to carve “Will You Marry Me?” into a collection of pumpkins, finishing his project literally the second she walked through the front door of their apartment.
In the run-up to the big day, Jamie accidentally saw her in the first wedding dress she bought. Feeling superstitious, she sold it.
The second one was a traditional-looking stunner that she wore in their October 18, 2014 ceremony, which they held in a majestic field in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. Everything proceeded perfectly, from her older boys serving as groomsmen right down to the four-leaf clover Jamie found on the walk to where they posed for their wedding portraits.
Two years later, they welcomed River, a redheaded bundle of joy that made their family of six complete.
And Melissa loved nothing more than spending time with them doing ... pretty much anything — whether that meant taking the boys for the hundredth time to traipse through Backyard Terrors Dinosaur Park just across the state line in Tennessee; or dressing up like superheroes with River; or just getting fast food from the drive-through with Jamie, parking next to the restaurant, and talking about life as they watched traffic go by.
The only thing that dissatisfied her in life was her job, and she solved that last year when she left it to start her own cleaning business, enabling her to spend more time with Jamie and the kids.
It seemed as if her life couldn’t get much better. But then it started raining.
‘The hill behind it was terrifying to us’
Melissa’s younger sister, Elizabeth Hensley, had always felt extremely uneasy about Melissa’s home.
On the couple of occasions when she and her fiancé Tony would come up from where they lived in the Linville Caverns area and spend the night at Jamie and Melissa’s, Tony in particular would have trouble sleeping because, he’d say, of “that thing behind me.”
Some people are claustrophobic. Some people are afraid of heights. Tony had always been spooked that something — maybe everything up above the house — could slide down that hill at any moment and wind up doing some serious damage. Ahead of Hurricane Helene, this fear gripped Elizabeth, too.
“The house was gorgeous,” Elizabeth says, “but the hill behind it was terrifying to us.
“So you just sit here and you think and you wonder. ... I try to figure out, you know, if I would have just driven the 40 minutes up there, or if I pushed a little bit harder, or sent more messages, or —” she lets out a big sigh, then begins crying. “The guilt’s just real right now.”
But she just didn’t think the storm was going to be that bad. Neither did Jamie and Melissa. No one did.
And other than a little buzzing about Helene approaching, Thursday was pretty typical for the Guinns. Jamie had a day off from work, so he went and helped Melissa on one of her cleaning jobs. When their work was done, they decided to drive over to the Tennessee town of Elizabethton, where they picked up miso soups from a Japanese place for them, and pizza and Crazy Bread at Little Caesars for River.
They brought it back home and after River went to bed, Jamie watched Investigation Discovery while Melissa perused TikTok, occasionally leaning over to show her husband a funny pet video.
Overnight, the sound of the rain hitting their roof woke them up a couple of times, but on Friday morning, they still had electricity.
Then, without warning, the situation took a fierce turn. The power went out. The wind whipped up. Stuff outside the house started getting blown around. One tree fell, then a second. Their cellphone signals cut out. Another tree toppled over, taking out a transformer near the road and pulling down a power line onto their driveway. The winds picked up even more speed.
Yet in the midst of it all, Melissa saw something beautiful — something she’d seen during other hard rainstorms: a little waterfall behind the house, running down that very steep, very tall hill.
She took a video of it with her phone and brought it back to show Jamie. Look how pretty this is, she said to him.
Before long, the wind died down, and with no electricity and no TikTok or TV, Jamie, Melissa and River sat on their front porch and watched the river, which had swollen over its banks. The storm seemed to settle after that. They hoped the worst was over.
And then, right around 11 a.m. Friday, they heard a crash.
Landslide after landslide after landslide
They jumped up, ran through to other side of the house, and reacted in horror as they saw that a landslide had taken out their detached garage.
The messy pile of mud and debris was redirecting rainwater toward the main house and both Jamie and Melissa were frantically trying to move logs and vehicles to try to divert the flow of the water down the driveway. Jamie ran upstairs to get something — he now can’t remember what — but while looking for it, there was another even louder crash, almost like an explosion.
Jamie felt himself being crushed as the house seemed to cave in on him. The house groaned and popped and snapped as it slid down the bank into the river. Jamie screamed for River, who called back in a way that implied to Jamie that his son was OK.
Although Jamie was bleeding from a gash in his head and his back was in searing pain (he’d later learn his spine was fractured), he was able to get clear of the wreckage and make his way halfway up the bank to where River was stuck in muddy water.
As Jamie was picking him up, he looked up and saw Melissa standing over the foundation where the house had been — just in time to hear her scream, “Babe, watch out!”
In the next moment, he shoved River up the riverbank and lunged after him. Then an instant later, there was another thunderous crashing sound as a third landslide pummeled their property.
When he looked up again, Melissa was no longer there.
Jamie raced up the hill as fast as he could, fighting against gravity, mud, serious injuries and panic. He got to where their house had stood just a few minutes earlier and saw nothing but a swath of empty land. He screamed for her again and again and again.
But she was gone.
‘She’s gonna be River’s new superhero’
After a few minutes, Jamie realized that if there had been three vicious landslides, there could certainly be a fourth.
He realized he needed to get River to safety.
It would take hours before he was able to navigate over devastated hillsides and around raging rivers to reach a friend’s house nearly two miles away; it would take several more before first responders on off-road vehicles were able to reach the house and transport him to Cannon Hospital.
But with communication lines cut off throughout Western North Carolina, it would take days before Melissa’s family knew anything was wrong.
Her parents, Brian and Bernice Hensley of Marion, had driven to Hickory on the Sunday after the storm to get water to bring back. They were in Walmart when Jamie’s sister finally was able to get a phone call through to Bernice — who started screaming and wailing right in the middle of the store.
Elizabeth, Melissa’s younger sister, remembers initially thinking, OK, she’s missing. But somebody’s got her. She’s fierce, she’s a fighter, she’s mean. Somebody’s got her.
Last Monday, three days after being swept away, Melissa’s body was recovered.
It was like a blade through the heart. But at the same time, the family was comforted by a couple of notions.
For one, “she’s a hero,” Bernice believes, “because she saved Jamie and River by warning them — for making him look up. She gave her life for theirs, because that’s how much she loved them. ... She would want River and Jamie to be OK, and I know she would do it again. I know it. It’s so hard to put into words, but she —
“I guess she’s gonna be River’s new superhero.”
Even more so, they’re just so grateful that they have her back. That they know. They can’t imagine how they’d be feeling right now if she still was missing. If she’d been somehow lost forever out there. So they were glad, on Monday morning, to have found at least some small sense of peace.
Then later that day, they found something that gave Jamie yet a little bit more.
A memento from the best day of his life
Jamie was with Melissa’s family’s, all of them in the throes of unimaginable grief. Talking about Melissa. Talking about that house. About how she was gone, and how it was gone, and how all the memories they’d made together were literally laying in ruins.
“I would do anything,” he said at one point, “to have her wedding dress back.”
The room stayed quiet for several seconds. Then Melissa’s oldest son Brandon, 22, suddenly stood up. “Come on,” he said to his brothers Sebastian, 21, and Ethan, 17. Melissa’s father Brian joined them, too, as they got into a car and drove over to Minneapolis via the one road that still provided access to where Jamie and Melissa’s house once stood.
Together, the boys managed to cut their way into the old downstairs master bedroom, which was wedged between some trees, and together they disappeared into the hole.
When they came out, Ethan was holding onto his mother’s wedding dress.
“They come carrying it in, and it was completely caked in mud and soaking wet, but they found it,” Jamie recalls, crying softly.
Asked why he’d wanted it back so badly, he gives the simplest and sweetest possible answer: “Cause it was the best day of my life, the day she married me.”
The 10th anniversary of that day is Oct. 18, by the way — and if Helene had chosen another path, they almost certainly would have celebrated the occasion in the place they loved more than any other.
At home.
A GoFundMe has been established to help Jamie Guinn and his sons: gofundme.com/f/help-jamie-and-his-sons-rebuild-their-lives
