A little girl with wild red hair.

A former St. Louis homicide detective.

A native of Japan who traveled thousands of miles to start a family.

Those descriptions have little in common. About as much as a 2-year-old who loved his blankie and a 64-year-old who worked as a casino floor supervisor. But they all belong to people who – through an awful flash of fate – will be grouped together forever.

Those lines are feeble attempts to describe victims of the disastrous Nov. 6, 2005, tornado. Twenty years ago, the monstrous storm five-football-fields wide at its peak materialized out of nowhere in the middle of the night.

Forecasters hadn’t expected much more than a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm. And with much of the Tri-State sleeping and unprepared, it sliced across Western Kentucky, jumped

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