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       Rachel Lee and her 11-year-old daughter Amelia were on the first floor of their home in Dumfries, Va., when the violent storm struck Saturday night. Her 14-year-old daughter Matilda and the family dog were upstairs in her bedroom when a tree came crashing into the room.

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       Rachel quickly ushered the girls and the dog outside the house and sent them over to the neighbor’s place. Then she turned and called for her husband, Kenneth Allan Lee Jr., but did not get a response.

       Neighbors soon arrived with axes. She went back into the house with them and found Kenneth, crushed by the tree, which fell on him while he was in the shower.

       “He was a great father and one of my best friends,” Rachel said in a telephone interview Monday.

       Two days after major storm struck D.C., a slow recovery

       The couple, who married in August 2007, were a few weeks shy of their 16th wedding anniversary, although Rachel said the couple had celebrated earlier in the summer with an outing to see the “Barbie” movie.

       Rachel said Kenneth, who worked as a web designer at the Defense Department’s Marine Corps Community Services division in Quantico, liked to draw and plan family vacations. They had traveled to Sweden earlier this summer and had such a good time that they planned to visit next year for Christmas.

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       Speaking by phone from her home over the sound of hammering, chain saws, and construction work, Rachel said the tree was still on the house but that she had found a crew to help with the cleanup. She said she and her children are temporarily displaced until the cleanup is completed.

       Rachel said that her neighborhood has tons of tall trees and that some of the red oaks in the area have grown very large, but she said the tree that crashed through her home was in “perfect shape.” But, Rachel added, her home has clay soil, which makes it harder for the tree to hold on in strong winds such as the ones from Saturday’s violent storm.

       She described her husband as a “fantastic cook” who enjoyed making sous vide steak and baked potatoes with crispy skins. She said he also liked to work with both their daughters in the kitchen. Rachel said that before the Defense Department, Kenneth worked in web design for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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       Rachel, who works as a teacher for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, said her husband was creative and had a “real engineer’s brain.”

       In one instance, she said, the lanyard attachment for a microphone that one of her students wore at school had broken, meaning the microphone could no longer be worn. She brought the microphone home, and Kenneth made a case for it so it could be attached to any lanyard.

       “He could really design anything that we used or wanted,” she said.

       Here’s what caused Saturday’s destructive storms in the D.C. area

       Rachel said Kenneth enjoyed drawing and had taken online tutorials to learn how to create a video game. When he was younger, he used to create fantasy stories and choose-your-own adventure books. One of his favorite charities, she said, was Child’s Play, which donates video games to children in hospitals around the world.

       “When we were first married, he would sneak video games into the charity at Christmastime so they would have something,” Rachel said. “We brought our Switch on vacation and played Mario Kart together. He liked playing with the kids.”

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