Lightning arced off tree and hit smartphone in dad’s pocket, family says

One minute, the 40-year-old father of two was mowing the last little bit of lawn at his mother’s home in Somerville, Tenn. The next minute, he was dead.

“It’s just a freak accident, one of those things you read about,” Darrell Hoskins’ aunt Barbara Steward told WREG. “They said it was a small cloud that just popped up overhead. Just a couple pops of lightning and that was it.”

Hoskins was a father of two daughters who enjoyed target shooting, flea markets, WWE wrestling and time with his family, according to his obituary.

He was cutting grass at his mother’s home when the storm rolled in and lightning struck, according to Fox 13.

“He had his earbuds in listening to music on his phone, so he probably didn’t hear the thunder,” his mother Glenda Steward told WMC. His young daughter was the one who found him, and ran three houses down the street to find someone to call 911, the station reported.

The family told WREG they believe the lightning struck a tree, then arced to a phone Hoskins was keeping in his shirt pocket as he worked. The phone was fried, which is why his daughter had to run elsewhere for help, according to WMC.

A family friend of Hoskins’ made a GoFundMe page to help with funeral expenses and to raise money for his two children

“Darrell had the sweetest, gentlest spirit. Everyone loved him and he loved everybody,” Stewart told WREG. “Don’t take the chance,” she said. “He was out here finishing up a little patch of grass. A little patch of grass left un-mowed is not worth risking your life.”

It’s been an exceptionally deadly year for lightning strike deaths in Tennessee, with Hoskins’ death marking the third fatality in the state in less than two months, according to Patch.

Others across the country have had some serious close calls with lightning in the last few months as well.



A teen in Minnesota was asleep in a cabin when lightning struck the building, passed through his body and lit his bed on fire in early July, and a few months later a teen had to perform CPR on her boyfriend after lightning struck him while they camped in Colorado. Both teens survived.

This story was originally published July 17, 2018 at 1:59 PM with the headline "Lightning arced off tree and hit smartphone in dad’s pocket, family says."