Victor Linero was watching coverage of Hurricane Milton’s churn toward Florida when, suddenly, he saw a live video of a tornado near his grandfather’s home — hours before the hurricane was supposed to hit on the opposite side of the state.

In a panic, Mr. Linero warned his grandfather over the phone that he needed to take cover.

“I was screaming, ‘Papi, get shelter now!’” recalled Mr. Linero, 26, who was raised by his grandfather. “And then I start hearing, ‘Oh my God. Ahh!’”

He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, let out a final scream. Then the other end of the line went silent.

By the time it was over, what looked to be two tornadoes had plowed through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Mr. Alonso lived. They had decimated mobile homes, tossed trucks aside and toppled trees, all while Hurricane Milton was nearly 200 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the end, Mr. Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend and four other people were dead. Roughly 125 houses, all of them mobile homes, were destroyed. It was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing ironies: that an area on the opposite coast from where the brunt of the hurricane hit saw more deaths than any other single spot during the storm.

“We were not in an evacuation area,” Anita Perrotta, who lives in the community with her husband, said as she described the two of them hiding in their home at Spanish Lakes while the tornado threw debris against it.

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