YELM, Wash. — There was something different about the morning of October 25 for Ariyah Kluski.
It wasn’t the event she was going to — it’s the fourth year she’s opened up her family’s facepainting booth at the Trick or Treat at McKenna Park— but this time, she was doing it solo.
“I had gone with one of [my mother’s] friends,” Ariyah recalled, “it definitely was windy that morning, but not close to where it was later that afternoon.”
Her mother, Teshia, was running another Halloween facepainting event for their company, FaceCraft. At 16 years old, it was the first time Ariyah was going to an event on her own.
“Our whole thing is that we don’t use any stencils, so it’s all free-handed and individually done,” Ariyah said.
“It has kind of been slow, which now I am thankful for,” she remembered from that day.
The wind picked up as the day went along, but right as the clock turned to 1 p.m., the giant cottonwood in the center of McKenna Park began to blow apart.
At first, a large limb fell. It sent Ariyah running towards the parking lot. Another branch hit her.
“I had gotten hit in the back of the leg, I fell and got pinned,” she recalled.
A doctor would tell her later she sprained her ankle, but that’s not where her attention was at the time. When she got herself up and looked back toward the park, she heard a crack that sounded like thunder. That’s when a large trunk of the tree began to fall. That’s when she saw a ten-year-old boy.
“I remember looking around, and I saw that he was at the booth without his mom. I remember thinking, ‘it’s still really windy, the tree’s still actively falling,’ and I picked him up and I ran as far as I could with him.”
“If it had fallen in the other direction, I wouldn’t have been able to get him out of there. It was definitely really scary feeling responsible for somebody like that. I was really worried that he would have been one of the casualties when the tree fell,” she added.
A man in his 30s was killed, and several others were injured after the tree fell on multiple booths at the park.
Ariyah found the boy’s parents as they were helping other people at the park. She remembers seeing the man who was killed that day, as well as several other people injured. She says any physical pain is overtaken by the emotional pain.
“I think it was really shocking for everybody because there were some major injuries and a lot of people who lost their livelihood or their business because of the destruction... people were trying to understand that someone had died in that,” said Ariyah.
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