- The sister of one of the Amazon warehouse tornado victims said the e-commerce giant failed its employees.
- "The richest company in the world can't keep their employees safe," Rachel Cope, the sister of Clayton Cope, told Insider.
- Clayton was one of six workers killed after a tornado ripped through a company warehouse in Illinois.
The sister of one of the Amazon workers who was killed when a tornado ripped through a company warehouse in Illinois said Tuesday that she was furious that the trillion-dollar e-commerce giant couldn't keep its employees safe.
"I'm angry," Rachel Cope, 28, the younger sister of 29-year-old Clayton Cope, told Insider. "The richest company in the world can't keep their employees safe."
"That's just disgusting," Rachel railed.
Clayton, a US Navy veteran and maintenance mechanic for Amazon, was one of the six employees killed after a tornado devastated a massive delivery site in Edwardsville, IL on Friday night and caused the roof of the building to collapse.
"All [Amazon] cared about was making sure that people's Christmas presents got delivered," said Rachel.
Clayton was in contact with his and Rachel's dad — who works at the same Amazon warehouse, but was not working that night — after the first tornado sirens went off shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday, according to Rachel.
"My dad was on the phone with [Clayton] and telling him to get to the shelter" inside of the 1.1-million-square-foot warehouse, said Rachel, explaining that Clayton initially refused because he said wanted to warn others of the looming danger.
Rachel added, "My brother was saying 'no, there's a ton of drivers that are coming back and I need to go warn them to get inside and get to the shelter because they don't know where to go."
Shortly after the building collapsed.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Insider on Tuesday, but said in a previous statement that management at the Edwardsville facility "acted incredibly quickly" to get workers into a designated ground-level shelter at the site.
"There was a small group who took shelter in a part of the building that was then directly impacted by the tornado, and this is where most of the tragic loss of life occurred," Amazon said.
Employees had just minutes of warning before the roof of the building collapsed, the company had said.
A manager who survived the disaster told the Cope family that he saw Clayton "physically helping people get to the shelter" amid a "frantic" situation before the tornado hit, Rachel said.
"My brother was a hero," she said. "He was a really, really, really good guy. He was the kind of guy that would do anything for anybody."
Rachel, who said she previously worked at a nearby Amazon warehouse for over a year, said that the company should have been better prepared.
"They're a company that is known for not caring about their employees," she said, claiming Amazon treats its employees as "replaceable."
"And that's how they'll feel about my brother," Rachel said. "They'll feel he's replaceable. They don't care."