NEED TO KNOW
- Stacey Bruno, her husband and their two children evacuated their home in New Orleans a day before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and traveled by car to her parents’ place in Minneapolis
- After hearing about their story, Greg Lawrence, a local businessman, offered the family a home to stay in rent-free for a year
- The Bruno family has since returned to New Orleans and Stacey and her husband Harold have welcomed two more kids
Stacey Bruno still remembers the very long drive from New Orleans to Minneapolis that she and her family undertook 20 years ago as they were fleeing the city one day before Hurricane Katrina struck.
“We didn’t know if we were gonna be coming back, but we didn’t bring much at all,” Stacey, 46, tells PEOPLE, which first covered the family’s ordeal in September 2005. “We had nothing but just the clothes on our backs and whatever we had in our suitcases.”
At the time, Stacey, then 26, and her family — husband Harold, 31, and their two children, daughter Tiara, 8, and son Harold Jr., 6 — considered waiting out the storm at home. But their growing uneasiness made them decide to travel to Minneapolis, where Stacey’s parents lived.
“My sister had her kids and she didn’t really have any transportation,” Stacey recalls. “So we wound up picking up my sister the day before the storm and we all left. My in-laws were in one vehicle, and we were in another vehicle with my sister and her children.”
Stacey’s in-laws were dropped off in Mississippi, her mother-in-law had relatives there, while the rest of the family continued onward to Minneapolis, a journey that lasted over 20 hours and 1,043 miles. Once they arrived, the family turned on the TV to see what was happening back home.
“We found out that the levees broke and our city was flooded,” Stacey recalls. “We couldn’t get back.”
Fortunately for the Brunos, Greg Lawrence, a local businessman, heard about the family’s dilemma and he and his wife Janet invited the family to live rent-free for a year in a home he owned.
“They’re very lovely people,” says Stacey. “They pulled out all the stops. They made sure that we had bedding and clothes and food. They were really, really hospitable to us.”
Other residents assisted Stacey and her family with donations, from a bunk bed to a 27-inch television. “We even actually had somebody at one point donate a vehicle to us,” says Stacey. “We really got everything that we needed.”
During their stay in Minneapolis, the Brunos did briefly return to New Orleans to salvage what was left of their home. “You had people going around and marking houses,” Stacey says. “And unfortunately, we had people actually go into our home and take a lot of things.”
Still, the family was able to recover some personal keepsakes such as photos, the kids’ report cards and most importantly, a china cabinet that Stacey’s father, a military veteran, picked up from Korea. “He gave this china cabinet to my grandmother,” she says. “It was definitely a family heirloom. Surprisingly I was able to get that china cabinet and bring it back to Minnesota to my parents.”
Courtesy Stacy Bruno
Stacey and Harold remained in Minneapolis until their two children finished out the 2006 school year and then the family returned to New Orleans for good.
“We had to actually go into a trailer park, and the trailer was very small,” Stacey says. “We stayed there for a while. And then we were able to get an apartment some months later. From there, we wound up getting housing somewhere else.”
Since last speaking with PEOPLE, Stacey and Harold, today 51, welcomed two more children, son Antonio, 16, and daughter Autumn, 11.
Having formerly worked for the New Orleans Police Department, Stacey is today with the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services; she also has a sideline career as a photographer. And she became a grandmother for the first time when her today-grown-up son Harold Jr. and his fiancée Janay welcomed daughter A’Myri, today 1.
Courtesy Stacy Bruno
Twenty years after Katrina, Stacey says the experience has changed the way she thinks about hurricanes. “When hurricane season comes upon us, we always grapple. We see a storm and we think, ‘Is this the big one? Is this one that we have to leave? If we evacuate, is it gonna be forever this time?’ ” she says.
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She also hasn’t forgotten about the generosity of Greg and Janet Lawrence.
“I haven’t talked to the Lawrences much since,” Stacey says. “I always wonder how his family is doing, and I always like to let him know, ‘Hey, my family’s doing fine.’ “
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