A mother and her toddler daughter died Sunday after being struck by lightning outside their South Florida home, according to local authorities.
Officials identified the victims as 31-year-old Kenya Glasgow and her 2-year-old daughter, Kennedi.
The incident took place in Margate, a suburb located northwest of Fort Lauderdale. Emergency crews arrived on scene to find Glasgow and the child unresponsive on the ground next to their parked car. Both were quickly transported to a nearby medical facility, where doctors attempted life-saving resuscitation efforts. Both victims were pronounced dead shortly after arrival.
Witnesses in the neighborhood described a sudden and violent bolt of lightning. Prince Moody, who lives nearby, told a local NBC that the strike shook his house.
“My son said, ‘Dad, there’s a lady on the floor. She got hit,’” Moody said.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 37 million lightning strikes hit the ground in the United States every year.
While the CDC estimates a person’s chances of being struck at less than one in a million—with around 90 percent of victims surviving—Florida remains the most dangerous state in the nation for lightning activity.
Meteorologists note that Florida’s peninsular geography, surrounded by warm Gulf and Atlantic waters, creates daily colliding sea breezes that generate thousands of intense convective thunderstorms each summer. The state routinely leads the country in lightning-related injuries, fatalities, and strikes per square mile.
The Tampa Bay region’s intense lightning activity is woven directly into its identity. When the National Hockey League awarded an expansion franchise to the Tampa Bay area in 1990, founder Phil Esposito chose the name Tampa Bay Lightning specifically because the area had earned the moniker of the “Lightning Capital of North America.”
However, the connection between the region and electrical storms reaches back centuries.
Historians trace the name “Tampa” to the language of Florida’s indigenous Calusa and Tocobaga tribes, with early records translating the native word to mean “sticks of fire” or “split wood for fire.” Scholars have long linked the phrase to the frequent lightning strikes that illuminated the coastal skies long before the arrival of Spanish explorers.
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