A member of Hope Mennonite Church in Grassy Ridge was seriously injured in Chocowinity this week while helping with the recovery from the April 25 tornadoes.

Willlie Derstine sustained a skull fracture across the front of the face, as well as damage to his eye sockets, a broken jaw and lacerations to his face when he was pinned between a falling tree trunk and other logs on the ground.

Derstine said the accident happened last Saturday when his church had partnered with a Methodist church in the area to donate time and manpower to help victims clean up debris and trees in their yards.

According to Derstine, most of the trees were twisted off about 25 feet above the ground, making it difficult for volunteers to remove trees safely, but his logging experience made him confident in his ability. However, the way in which the trees were twisted due to the torque and tension the tornadoes had put on the tree trunks created a different situation, Derstine said.

“When they’re rung off like that, they don’t have much top so they don’t want to fall down real easy by themselves,” Derstine said. “I cut the first one and notched it to fall out in an open area and I cut it in and it was sitting there on the hinge. It should’ve fallen, but it didn’t because it didn’t have any top to give it weight to fall.”

Derstine said he thought about trying to deal with the tree by another method, but the tree next to it needed cutting. He thought that if he cut the second tree down, it would be easier to deal with the tree that would not fall and the workers could come back to it later.

“I notched the next one and cut that one,” Derstine said. “To me, everything looked perfect. It looked like a good cut.”

But the hinge didn’t hold and the tree fell toward the road away from where Derstine wanted it to fall — and directly toward him, he said.

“I left my saw in the cut and I just stepped around the trunk of the tree because that’s the shortest distance to get out of the way,” Derstine said. “I was watching the trunk as it was falling and it looked like it was swinging around toward me, so I just kept walking around the base to get out of its way.”

Derstine thinks there must have been a branch connecting the two trees because the first one began to fall as well.

“I was concentrating on getting out of the way of the one that I saw that was falling because I never saw the other one falling until it hit me,” he said.

The rest of the group immediately came to Derstine’s aid and used a tractor to lift the log out of the way just long enough for him to free himself. By that time, the ambulance arrived.

The 21-year-old volunteer was hospitalized — first at Vidant Beaufort Hospital, then Vidant Medical Center in Greenville. He is scheduled for surgery this week.

“They say it should heal up and I shouldn’t look too bad after it’s all done,” Derstine said. “They scheduled my facial surgeries for this coming Friday so they’re going to put some plates and screws in my face to try and line that back up. They are probably going to use screws and plates on my jaw, too, instead of wiring it so I am thankful for that.”