A truck driver has been keeping watch and feeding the neighborhood while living in his semi truck after a tornado tore down many houses in the area. 

Truck driver Tony Stewart says that he was sitting in his regular car in the parking lot of his apartment complex when an EF3 tornado tore through the neighborhood on May 16th. His apartment building was deemed structurally unsafe a few days later, so Stewart headed across the street to where his semi truck was parked and moved right in. 

“I wanted to stay around and monitor the neighborhood, make sure everybody was safe. I thought it would be more helpful than not [keeping watch], you know?” he said to KSDK. “I’m blessed to have everything. Some people have nothing.”

The day after the storm, Stewart and his friend Larry Gray decided to grill up some food and feed people left without their homes or things, and the two haven’t stopped feeding people since. 

“I’ve been sleeping in my 18-wheeler … for 30 days now,” Stewart said. “I thought it would be a great idea if we put all the resources together and we just fed the neighborhood. Just maintain a meal a day, making sure everybody around here eats.”

“Since day one, my friend and I have been feeding the neighborhood free of charge, making sure that at least everybody has a hot meal every day,” he continued. “It just carried on and blew up into more than my friend and I thought… We’re getting a lot of donations and welcoming more donations.”

“The next thing you know, it turned into what it is now. We feed easily over 100 people a day,” Gray added. “Some people come back twice, and that’s fine with us.”

Since that day, Stewart and Day set up a tent near his semi truck in the parking lot at the northeast corner of Ashland and Newstead Avenues in the Ville neighborhood in St Louis, Missouri and grill from noon until 10 p.m. 

“I wanted to stay here just to make sure the undesirables didn’t have a wide open safe to do whatever they wanted to do,” Stewart said. “Some people had to leave their homes. Their stuff is still inside. Some of that you can’t replace, like pictures and family keepsakes. So I just stayed.”

While there is still a lot of work to do, the friends say they have come a long way since the storm hit a month ago. The two also say they plan to keep feeding people and keeping watch for as long as they can, and are welcoming donations. 

 “As a team effort, this community came together very well, and what you see now is not how it was 30 days ago,” said Stewart. “It was devastating. It was almost like a war zone.”

“If God puts it on your heart to donate,” Gray said, “buy some hot dogs, or a pack of charcoal and drop it off. It doesn’t have to be much. Just enough to help us help others.”

“You don’t have to eat,” Gray continued. “Just stop by, say hi, so you can see for yourself what’s going on down here.”