Dad of 15 dies after he’s struck by lightning, Pennsylvania wife says. ‘We are broken’

A father of 15 children was fatally struck by lightning while working on his semi-truck during a haul through Ohio, his family in Pennsylvania said.

Daryl Lewis was with one of his kids on the side of Interstate 75 when he was hit July 6 in Sidney, Ohio, WTAE reported.

“The next phone call I got was my frantic 10-year-old screaming and crying,” his wife, Tanya Lewis, told the TV station. “They were doing CPR and putting him into an ambulance.”

He was taken to a trauma center in Dayton, where doctors discovered he had no brain activity, according to a GoFundMe raising funds for the Lewis family.

Tanya Lewis says her husband died at about 5:10 p.m. Thursday, July 7.

“Myself and my children are not OK,” she wrote on Facebook. “We are broken please just keep us in your prayers.”

An obituary for the 50-year-old man, of Dravosburg, says he was a truck driver, husband, father of 15 and grandpa to three.

“I have his kids, I have my kids and then we adopted because we never had any of our own (together),” his wife told WTAE. “We actually had three of our kids follow in his footsteps, my daughter started (truck) driving the same day this happened, they were supposed to meet for lunch.”

A friend of the couple described Daryl Lewis as a “hard working tough guy but in the presence of his kids and family he was a soft compassionate man.”

“To say he was a great man would be the biggest understatement ever,” she said. “He loved with no biases.”

Dravosburg is a suburb of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, about 270 miles east of where Daryl Lewis was struck by the lightning in Sidney.

This story was originally published July 14, 2022 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Dad of 15 dies after he’s struck by lightning, Pennsylvania wife says. ‘We are broken’."