In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Kim Copeland — who lost her son and husband in the recent Nice, France terror attack — described the harrowing moments following the incident.
“All of a sudden, I hear my husband scream, ‘Watch out!’ and I look up and see a big white truck headed straight towards us,” she told NBC's Janet Shamlian in an exclusive interview.
Copeland’s husband, Sean, ran over to their 11-year-old son Brodie when the unimaginable happened.
A man driving a large box truck plowed through a crowd of pedestrians gathered to watch fireworks celebrating Bastille Day on July 14. Police eventually shot the driver to death in the attack, which killed 84 people.
By the time Kim Copeland made it over to her son, “I knew that he was gone” she said.
Her husband lived a few hours longer, the entire time asking about Brodie.
“We were that family that was all over. ‘Two Americans have died,' and that's us. That's our two Americans,” Copeland said. “It was a nightmare. It is a nightmare.”
It was supposed to be a dream vacation for the Copeland family, which included Sean’s two adult children, Maegan and Austin. Dozens of Facebook messages, text messages and online tributes began pouring in.
“Although none of us were responding directly to them, we were reading them,” Kim Copeland said.
The memorials for her baseball-loving son and Sean, whose warning likely saved the lives of his wife and two adult children, are now over, and a new reality of living back home in Texas, alone, has sunk in for Copeland.
“This house that we built together that we wanted to live in forever is empty,” she said.
But Copeland has no regrets about going abroad.
“I don't regret going on our family vacation together because we had the most amazing days and minutes together as a family of five that I wouldn't take back,” she said.
Despite enduring such heartbreak, Kim Copeland says she keeps going for Sean and Brodie.
“So I get up and go for them. So that they know I’m OK, because neither one of them would want me to be sad,” she said.