Mother, father and child killed by fallen tree in Tennessee heavy rains and flooding

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A mother, father and child were killed when a tree fell on their car during heavy rain and flooding in Tennessee, where submerged roads also led to dramatic rescues of people trapped in their cars, authorities said Wednesday.

The three were killed when saturated ground caused a large tree to fall in the Chattanooga suburb of East Ridge just after midnight, Hamilton County Office of Emergency Management spokesperson Amy Maxwell said.

Additionally, authorities found a body Wednesday while searching for a man who was swept away when he ran past firefighters and a barricade blocking a flooded road Tuesday, according to the Chattanooga Fire Department. The local police and medical examiner will determine the cause of death.

The flooding prompted rescues of people stuck in homes and swamped vehicles.

At a news conference Wednesday, officials said they didn't expect so much rain and flooding to hit so quickly.

At one point, there were 60 vehicles on the flooded interstate, said Chris Adams, director of emergency management for Hamilton County. Some first responders were carrying people on their backs who couldn't move well through the water, and placed them on the raised highway divider, Adams added.

“We all know to 'turn around, not drown,’ but when you look at it and it’s 2 inches deep, and then next thing you know it’s 4 feet deep, that’s something you’ve never seen before,” Adams said.

There were so many calls for help that 911 calls were “holding in every minute of every hour for about three hours straight,” with more than 940 calls between 6 p.m. and midnight, said Barbara Loveless, director of operations for Hamilton County 911.

Troy Plemons, a communications systems technician for EPB, Chattanooga’s electricity and telecommunications utility, said he was stuck in traffic on an interstate in his bucket truck for two to three hours Tuesday evening.

Then Plemons said he saw the flood water lift an SUV, and when he and two Lawson Electric workers encouraged a woman inside to get out, she threw up her hands because she didn’t know if she could. Plemons moved to the bed of a truck next to him to try to get closer, but the water was rising to her chest.

“I didn’t think there was any time,” he said. “I tried my best.”

Plemons said the water was reaching neck level for the woman in the SUV when he used a boring bit offered by the Lawson Electric workers to break the window and helped the woman get out.

“It was a rush for sure. I felt like I was pretty calm until I broke the window,” Plemons said. “I was doing everything I could to get her out because the water was rising pretty quick.”

There were several rescues of people whose cars were overwhelmed by water in the area until the water receded about two to three hours later and traffic began to move again, Plemons said.

“I felt like I was there at the right time,” he said. “I’m thankful I was there to help that lady.”

Lawson Electric said its workers, Austin Camp and Brandon Shadwick, coordinated for hours with Plemons as well as authorities to help move between 25 and 35 people.

“From babies to seniors, we just kept moving. We didn’t talk to each other," Shadwick said in a news release. "We just worked as hard and as fast as we could to move people to safety.”

Anderson Stout watched it unfold from his truck.

“As soon as he pulled her out of that vehicle, I’m not joking, in maybe three minutes, her vehicle was almost completely submerged under the water,” Stout said.

The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for much of middle Tennessee through Wednesday night, warning of scattered flash flooding with tropical-like heavy rainfall and the possibility of training storms, especially over already saturated areas.

Chattanooga's airport recorded more than 6.4 inches (about 16 centimeters) of rain Tuesday, marking the second-wettest day recorded for the city dating back to 1879, according to a social media post by the National Weather Service in Morristown. The highest single-day total was nearly 9.5 inches (24 centimeters) in September 2011 from the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee, the weather service said.

Chattanooga Fire crews rescued people trapped in vehicles and residents stuck in their homes, fire department officials said. Flooding closed parts of Interstate 24 in the area, but it reopened once floodwaters receded.

Swiftwater rescue teams rescued residents of three East Ridge homes trapped by rising floodwaters, according to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.

Wamp, the mayor, toured East Ridge on Wednesday. He said that though there was a tragic loss of life, the property and infrastructure damage was “not as bad as I thought it would have been based on the way things looked last night.”

Brumfield reported from Cockeysville, Maryland.

East Ridge Mayor Brian Williams speaks during a news conference Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, in Chattanooga, Tenn. in response to the recent severe flash flooding in the area. (Abby White/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

Traffic moves slowly through floodwaters on Bonny Oaks Drive, in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Aug. 12, 2025. (Mason Edwards/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

The East Brainerd branch of First Horizon Bank is flooded by the waters of Mackey Branch, in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Aug. 12, 2025. (Robin Rudd/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

Cars struggle through floodwaters the eastbound lanes of US Interstate 24, in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Aug. 12, 2025. (Robin Rudd/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

A car is stranded in floodwater on Gunbarrel Road, in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Aug. 12, 2025. (Robin Rudd/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

A vehicle is submerged in a flooded road in Chattanooga, Tenn., Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (WTVC via AP)

Traffic moves through a flooded road in Chattanooga, Tenn., Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (WTVC via AP)

A truck drives through flooded road in Chattanooga, Tenn., Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (WTVC via AP)

LONDON (AP) — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran's bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.

A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.

Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.

The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.

In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.

She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.

And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.

In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.

Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.

In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.

It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?

Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.

The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.”And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.

Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman's act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.

The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.

On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the handle Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.

She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.

It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.

“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.

In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.

“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”

In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.

The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.

“All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”

A demonstrator lights a cigarette with a burning poster depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally in support of Iran's anti-government protests, in Holon, Israel Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

CORRECTS MONTH - A protester lights a cigarette off a burning poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a demonstration in Berlin, Germany, in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

A protester burns an image of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a cigarette during rally in support of the nationwide mass demonstrations in Iran against the government, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026 in Zuerich, Switzerland.(Michael Buholzer /Keystone via AP)