A chilling video shows the moment a single mother’s home collapsed and was thrown into a river during a deadly storm in Connecticut. The two-story home crumbled to pieces after hours of heavy rain and flooding.

Video shows tables and chairs falling from the building just before the roof collapses, sliding down the embankment below and falling onto the rocky bank of the creek, which had swollen during the storm. Homeowner Randi Marcucio and her three-year-old son escaped the tragedy.

“The river began to sweep away the massive, tall, tall, tall deck piers”

“You just fall to the ground. Everything breaks,” Marcucio told the New York Post.

Marcucio is a single mother and emergency room nurse. She lived in the Oxford home for two and a half years. She purchased the house on Mother’s Day 2022. She was enchanted by the beautiful, narrow Fivemile Brook that flows along the property.

Marcucio was just about to cook dinner last week when the storm swelled the creek. The flooding became monstrous, turning the street into a river and washing away chunks of the mound of earth on which the house sat. “The river started to take away the massive, tall, tall, tall deck piers,” Marcucio said.

“The deck started to crumble. The deck broke. The oil tank came off the house. Slowly but surely over the course of hours, everything started to crumble. The basement started to crumble. The basement broke. A lot of the basement broke. And then the second story just kind of hung,” she added.

On Monday, August 19, the house collapsed. However, Marcucio was not there at the time and helped neighbors find shelter during the storm. Later, she slept at her parents’ house.

It was a neighbor who heard the cracking and ran to Marcucio’s house, only to find it was gone. Marcucio said she couldn’t recover her losses. The damage wasn’t covered because she didn’t have flood insurance.

Marcucio, however, maintains her positive attitude and finds strength in her son’s love. “He’s amazing. He’s such a smart, happy kid and he knows something is wrong, but he’s happy to see his mommy,” Marcucio said.

“He doesn’t even know what’s going on. All he knows is that people keep coming to him… He’s seen me in different houses, he’s seen me soaking wet. He saw me crying the last day, so he’s glad mom is here and now he can show mom the things his ‘friends’ – strangers – have come to him with,” she added, referring to donations from her neighbors and money raised through a GoFundMe campaign.

“Oh my God. It’s unbelievable. One breath you want to die, and the next you think, ‘This is it. This is life,'” Marcuico said.

She added: “I didn’t lose my life. My son didn’t lose his life. We lost our things. Two women lost their lives. How can I even begin to complain about anything?”

The storm was so destructive that two women died about five miles north of Marcucio’s property. One of them was washed away as she walked along the road.