Donna Fagersten, 66, had gone to a friend’s two-story condo to be safe from Hurricane Helene. But she went to retrieve her cat and didn’t make it back to her friend’s home, her son told NBC News on Sunday.
Fagersten is one of nine people identified by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office who were killed by Hurricane Helene in the county. She lived on one of Florida’s barrier islands, Indian Rocks Beach, where most of the deaths have occurred and many who were killed were older adults. The sheriff’s office said all the victims were in areas of a mandatory evacuation zone.
“I don’t even know if this is correct because I haven’t been down there to verify anything, but it seems like she decided to go check on her cat,” John Runner, Fagersten’s son, said. “Didn’t make it back.”
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said water entered her home and it appeared she had drowned. But Runner said his mother was found outside her condo in the parking lot and “she didn’t make it to the house.”
Runner, a high school art teacher in West Virginia, and his brother, a firefighter, also in West Virginia, hoped to be in Florida by Monday or Tuesday to inspect their mother’s home and deal with the aftermath.
He said he usually spoke to his mother before hurricanes, to check on her, but he hadn’t been paying attention to news and wasn’t aware that this dangerous storm was bearing down on Florida’s west coast. They last spoke a couple weeks ago or so, he said.
When he talked to her about leaving in other hurricanes, she was always reluctant. Her routine was to go to her friend’s condo that was up on stilts.
“I would call and she would always say, ‘Yeah, you know, I got a cat. The cat doesn’t travel well. It’s kind of hard to move.’ … Her friend lived a couple blocks away and had a two-story condo.”
“They called to evacuate where she was at Indian Rocks Beach, but she didn’t go, obviously,” he said.
There was no higher ground for his mother to go to for safety, he said.
“If you walk behind the condos, it’s the Intracoastal Waterway right there, so there’s water on either side. On one side is the Gulf of Mexico and on the other is the Intracoastal. It’s surrounded by water and it’s flat,” he said.
Fagersten had been on leave from her work as a teacher. She had broken her hip in the spring and was finishing up therapy. She planned to retire when she was done with it, possibly before the end of the school year, Runner said.
She had five grandchildren.
He said his mother had enjoyed travel. Her marriage to his stepfather had taken her to Germany and while there she went to Turkey and they made family trips to Scotland and Portugal.
“Obviously, she loved the beach,” he said. “She loved being outside in that area, so that’s why she lived there.”
