ANDERSON, Ind. — With dust swirling in their faces as the winds picked up at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis on Saturday, a group of Anderson residents watched in horror as the concert stage collapsed onto the crowd below.

Dan Whitehead and his wife, Erin, had just stood up to leave the concert, concerned about weather, when they noticed that Doug Long, a friend and fellow attorney, had dust in his eyes and couldn’t see. A few yards away, Anderson mother Angel Lewis was sitting in the front row of the grandstands with her 5-year-old daughter, Berkley. Lewis watched lightning flashes in the distance and eyed the darkening sky, hoping the Sugarland concert wouldn’t be canceled or postponed.

Seeing the weather get worse, the Whiteheads grabbed Long and helped his wife begin to lead the disoriented Anderson man from the chairs on the track where the couples had been sitting.

Lewis stayed put as others around her headed for the exits. Lewis said the weather quickly seemed to worsen, and she feared that a tornado was coming. Even so, she knew that rushing out was a bad idea. “I was afraid my daughter would get trampled.”

Just as the Whiteheads began to leave their spot on the track, they saw the stage waver a few yards away.

“We glanced up and the scaffolding was holding big, huge speakers on both sides of the stages. We could see that, within two seconds, the speaker system collapsed on the left side and shifted the other way,” Whitehead said.

Whitehead, Long, and their wives, had been sitting in the seventh row from the stage on the dirt track, he said. The first three rows from the stage were crushed by the falling speakers and scaffolding.

Whitehead was horrified as he watched the massive speakers fall from the top of the stage.

“Over his (Long’s) shoulder, less than 15 feet, I could see the speakers come down on top of a lady. They actually hit her.”

Whitehead said the woman seemed to be clearing dust out of her eyes when the speaker came down on top of her.

“She just got devoured by it — gone,” he said.

Whitehead doesn’t know if that woman was one of the 45 people injured by the stage collapse, or one of the five who were killed. His gut tells him that she didn’t survive.

Whitehead said Sunday that he now believes he also witnessed the final moments of 51-year-old stage hand Nathan Byrd’s life. “I saw him going up that rope ladder, going up that scaffolding. Four minutes after that, he came crashing down with it.”

Nearby, Lewis and her daughter watched from their seats, afraid to move, afraid to look away.

As people scrambled from the grandstands around her, Lewis tried to comfort her daughter, who had seen the stage fall onto the crowd. “She was shaking and screaming and asking me what happened to the people under the stage.”

Instinctively, Lewis lied, telling her daughter that everyone had gotten out of the way in time.

It was hard to hide the truth from the child, however. “We saw several people trying to lift the beams off people who were crushed.”

Evacuated to the Pepsi Coliseum moments later, the mother and daughter huddled in the chaotic space of the shelter and listened as people screamed in horror, trying to come to grips with what they’d seen. “It was hard because I had to stay calm for her, but you could tell people had died.”

Long now wonders if the accident could have been prevented. “We’re wondering how come they didn’t tell us to get out of there earlier?”

With the sky turning dark Saturday, the crowd at the Sugarland concert was told that they would be evacuated to the fairgrounds coliseum if the weather became dangerous.

According to a time line issued by the Indiana State Police, fair officials learned from the National Weather Service at 7 p.m. that a storm capable of producing 1- to 2-inch hail, heavy rains, lightning and strong wind was headed their way.

Four minutes before the stage collapsed, the crowd was told where to evacuate, Whitehead said, but were not told to evacuate yet.

Whitehead said the stage collapse is being called a freak accident that couldn’t have been avoided, but he wonders why fair officials didn’t evacuate the crowd as weather worsened. “What they’re not talking about that’s frustrating me is that you could see the lightning and all the people were in metal grandstands.”

Lewis said she finds no fault in the fair’s handling of the weather warnings. The storm came on too strong and too quickly, she said, for anyone to evacuate. “If I thought there was any threat, I personally would have evacuated immediately with my daughter.”

After the stage collapsed, Whitehead said, he witnessed true heroism as civilians rushed the stage to help the injured.

“The remarkable thing in the world was seeing people running to the trouble, not away from it. You can see them throwing chairs and going right back into the fray,” he said.

Whitehead said he witnessed a woman giving a toddler CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation. “There was a young child that had been drug with the wreckage.”

“I don’t know who she was, but she’s a hero to me,” Whitehead said.

From listening to police radios nearby, he understood that it had been the second time the young child had to be revived.

On Sunday, both Whitehead and Lewis admitted they’ve watched the video of the collapse at least 50 times apiece trying to understand what they saw.

Luckily, Lewis has thus far been able to avoid revealing to her daughter that five people died and 45 people were injured in the accident.

Sunday morning, the child decided she’d seen and heard all she could handle. “She said ‘Let’s not talk about anything from last night.’”

Contact Brandi Watters: 640-4847, brandi.watters@heraldbulletin.com