Severe Tornadoes Hit Iowa, Illinois, Ohio; Extremely Dangerous Tornadoes Strike Midwest Tonight
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.</s>DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: This is CNN TONIGHT, I'm Don Lemon. Breaking news, another violent encounter with police caught on camera. Look at that, this time, San Bernardino County. Take a look at this incredible video. It's from KABC, a suspected horse thief is tased, punched and kicked repeatedly by what appears to be more than a dozen sheriff's deputies. We're going to tell you what happens next. Plus, South Carolina releases dash cam videos that captured what happened in the moments before Walter Scott was shot to death by ex- police officer, Michael Slager. We're going to break that down for you. We've got a lot to get to tonight but I want to begin with the breaking news. This breaking news, severe thunderstorms. Tornadoes, I should say, tearing through the Midwest. Forecasters say the situations in parts of Iowa, Illinois and Ohio, particularly dangerous. I want to get straight to CNN's Chad Myers in the Severe Weather Center for us tonight. Chad, what I'm hearing is the Midwest should be on alert. Is that correct?</s>CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Still tonight, even though now we've lost the sun and we've lost the sun's heat, the storms are still going to go for many more hours. The storms today were like a rake. Think about raking your garden. Every time a storm comes by, it came by, it put down a tornado, one after another after another, and they got very close to Chicago. We're lucky that Chicago didn't get in the way of somebody's tornado because I'm sure, Don, we're talking about EF-4 tornadoes. I don't know if it's in the EF-5, but I've seen some of this damage and it is alarming because the houses are gone. All the way down here, still a couple of storms here, down to Champaign, moving over into Indiana, have some storms near Detroit, Toledo and also into parts of eastern Ohio, and into parts of West Virginia, but these are now the strongest storms, and for a while, earlier today, we had a very large storm that did produce a tornado near Longview, Texas, just on the northeast part of town, as it moved through there. You'll notice, there's still red here on the map. These storms are not done yet tonight. They still will go for many more hours, make sure your NOAA weather radio was on or you can buy an app or you can get a free app, put it on your phone that will actually wake you up if something happens in your neighborhood. They're easy to find and they're easy to program, Don.</s>LEMON: Absolutely. And Chad Myers says it every time. You should listen to him. Chad, let's talk about Rochelle, Illinois, if you will. You mentioned the damage. We're hearing from our affiliate, WREX, reporter Lindsey Clark, five people, she saw, pulled out of a home, and there is major damage there?</s>MYERS: Not Rochelle itself. I mean, this has been an area of concern. We've been talking about this back and forth over the NEWSROOM. The storm moved just to the west of Rochelle. Maybe four, five miles. I know that doesn't seem like a lot if you live in New York City. But the town of Rochelle, compared to these suburbs, that's where the storm went through, and I know we had a reporter, a stringer that's going to talk to us about this. This was a very large, probably the F-4 tornado variety, a wedge tornado on the ground. A number of towns were seriously damaged today, and we probably will be talking about this for many more days to come. This was a very bad event out there, Don.</s>LEMON: You're looking at -- that's the twister that's on the ground right there, Chad, that you are looking at. How widespread is this system, and how long do you expect this to continue? You said tonight, but this is going to go into tomorrow?</s>MYERS: This probably goes into 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. even local time, Central Time, so forth, 4:00 Eastern Time. This storm will still be strong enough to put down some large tornadoes. Now not thinking we're probably going to see the F-4s and F-5s anymore. The heat of the day raises the temperature of the ground. The ground raises the temperature of the air. The air wants to rise like a hot air balloon, and that's what these storms did all day. They were up in the air, they created these big storm. There are all the tornado reports that we have tonight. One storm after another. The first one was near Peoria, and now we just have one string of storms all the way up, even up toward Milwaukee, but luckily as it got closer and closer to Wisconsin, these storms into cooler, and cooler air so they didn't affect the ground. They didn't get the rotation that they have when they were in Illinois. Weather service got this completely right, this is exactly where they head. Earlier today, we talked about the risk of severe weather. That was one circle. Then there was another circle here and it went all the way to the East Coast, and that's where the convective area was today. This is where the tornado threat was today, and this is exactly where it happened today -- Don.</s>LEMON: All right. Chad Myers, I want you to stand by because you're looking at this video, many times we get the video from storm chasers. I want to go to one of them now. Dan Gottschalk is on the phone, he is north of Rochelle, Illinois. Dan, first of all, I want you to tell us what you're seeing but do you know anything about these people who were pulled out of the house that our affiliate is reporting about?</s>DAN GOTTSCHALK, STORM CHASER: No, I don't really know too much about it. I know that there were also some people trapped in a restaurant there just north of Rochelle as well that they rescuing from the basement.</s>LEMON: OK. So what are you seeing where you are?</s>GOTTSCHALK: A lot of damage, long track damage for many, many miles. It wasn't just a twister that simply dropped and then went right back up. It was on the ground for an extended period of time.</s>LEMON: How big are we looking at here?</s>GOTTSCHALK: Honestly, it was -- it's at a point where it's getting pretty dark so I don't want to just go out and judge, but I mean, there is a third of a lot of damage to a lot of homes along a very long stretch that it traveled.</s>LEMON: Yes. So walk us through a bit more. You said there's a lot of damage to a lot of homes, to a stretch, and you mentioned a restaurant.</s>GOTTSCHALK: Yes.</s>LEMON: The type of damage that you're seeing. Sometimes we see homes that are just ripped from their foundations, other times it's just fields.</s>GOTTSCHALK: Right. Right. I mean, there were -- it was the whole gamut really. There were some homes that, you know, most of the walls were still standing, they lost their roof. And then there was a few that it was all the way down to just concrete. It was all that was left. It was swept clean.</s>LEMON: What time did it start -- did it start to get bad?</s>GOTTSCHALK: It -- we were chasing it all of the way from eastern Iowa when it was going near the Quad City, so that would have been, like, 5:30 and followed it all the way over here which would have been getting closer to about 8:00 at that point.</s>LEMON: OK. Stand by, Dan. I may need you, I want to bring in now storm chaser CJ Postal. CJ is on the phone with us. CJ, where are you exactly?</s>CJ POSTAL, STORM CHASER: Right now I'm actually in Genoa, Illinois, about five to 10 miles east of Kirkland.</s>LEMON: OK. What are you seeing?</s>POSTAL: In this town, this town was pretty much missed by the cell that went to the northwest. We saw a lot of damage. We pretty much followed the tornado for about 10 or 15 minutes as it was going from northwest -- I should say northeast of Oregon, Illinois, and then heading up towards the Kirkland area, and heading back towards the northeast again. We lost sight of it after it came and cause some damage.</s>LEMON: Yes. So you're saying you're in Ginnilla, and that is not much damaged, it pretty much missed that town, but as you were following it, what -- what did you witness? What kind of damage did you see?</s>POSTAL: We came up to the one intersection that was severely, severely damaged. There was a tractor-trailer on top of a building. On the northeast hand side of the street, then there was also an axle in the middle of the road, it would be the northwest corner of the intersection. I'm assuming it was from that tractor-trailer. There was also a house on the other side of intersection. The house looked like it got some minimum damage but there was another building where that tractor-trailer was that looked like it was severely hit.</s>LEMON: Stand by, CJ and Dan. I want to bring Chad Myers back in. Chad, before you go with the storm chasers, we don't know about any severe injuries or deaths yet? Correct? Are there getting reports of that?</s>MYERS: Right. One of the reports that I had that tells me that there is going to be is that there are houses that are missing, and there are still natural gas or propane hissing from the tanks, because the house is gone, the pipes aren't connected anymore, when that -- when you see that type of damage, even if you are in the interior rooms, you can still get injured. Let's start with Dan. Dan, you've chased a number of times, I've seen your videos all over the place, tell me about the damage you see to the homes and more extensively I saw you shoot a lot of trees. I think the town was Lynden Wood. The limbs were gone. Even some bark was gone. What did that tell you about the strength of the winds in that storm?</s>GOTTSCHALK: Honestly, it must have been a very strong tornado to be able to do that.</s>MYERS: Yes. CJ?</s>POSTAL: Yes.</s>MYERS: What did you see? What kind of damage did you see?</s>POSTAL: I don't want to go ahead, and throw out the numbers, but --</s>MYERS: Yes.</s>POSTAL: I saw damage that was consistent with a violent tornado.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>MYERS: Yes.</s>LEMON: All right, Chad.</s>MYERS: And you saw Kirkland, right?</s>POSTAL: Yes. We actually went just north of Kirkland. We're trying to actually catch back up to it once we lost sight of it, and in one of the rural areas. We didn't get into Kirkland, we came back around to the north side of town, and then we came into Ginnilla. By the time we got to Ginnilla, all of the emergency vehicles in town were heading west.</s>LEMON: All right. Chad, and we know that there were reports of major damage in Kirkland, that we're going to check on all of that. So, Chad Myers, Dan and CJ, I want everyone to stand by. Appreciate all of you. We're going to bring you the very latest on those Midwest tornadoes as we get more information here tonight on CNN. And when we come right back, I'm going to walk you through this newly released dash cam videos both of them from South Carolina. What they show and what they don't show you. Plus another shooting caught on camera. And a black man is dead, but this story is very different. I'm going to talk to the victim's mother.