The footage shows an abandoned car with its headlights still eerily lit.

“This person must have gotten out of this car real fast, the lights are still on,” said the cameraman, Mark Huneycutt, a sophomore in mechanical engineering.

The four-minute video of this weekend’s tornado’s path of destruction down South Saunders street, shot by Huneycutt right after the storm, has been viewed over half a million times since he uploaded it Saturday and has garnered national media attention.

In the video, Huneycutt walked around the neglected car with its driver side door punched in and the windows blown out. When he approached the car, it was still beeping, indicating the key had been left in the ignition.

Huneycutt said he was napping in his Bragaw dorm room when the storm came over the area. When the sirens came on, Huneycutt said he was not afraid.

“I don’t get scared easily, and it was actually kind of exciting,” Huneycutt said.

After the storm passed, Huneycutt drove down to South Saunders Street, since he said he had heard the street had been hit hard by the storms. His suitemates had declined to go with him.

“I was just really, really curious,” Huneycutt said. “I had never been in a place where a tornado came so close, so I wanted to see the destruction with my own eyes.”

When he arrived, the police had already blockaded the street. Huneycutt, undeterred, cut through the woods with his digital camera in hand.

Huneycutt photographed a few downed power lines, keeping his distance despite claiming he heard police saying the power was out. With his digital camera he recorded piles of jagged lumber and twisted bits of metal, all damp from the rain and pink bits of insulation clinging onto everything.

“I don’t even know where this came from,” Huneycutt said in the video, camera pointing at what was formerly the roof of a large structure. “There’s no building around here without that.”

Huneycutt moved on to an automobile body shop ripped open by the storm. One of the cars was still up on a hydraulic car lift.

“Wow, wow… Camaro,” Huneycutt said in the video, identifying one of the sports cars that had been crushed by chunks of the body shop. “Everything… crushed.”

Huneycutt said he spent almost an hour taking in the sights and sounds, though despite the overwhelming destruction in the area, Huneycutt said he felt it was a natural result of such a deadly storm.

After he uploaded the video Huneycutt said that he was receiving calls from major news outlets within the day like MSNBC, The Weather Channel, ABC, NBC17 and WRAL, and said they were impressed by the footage and asked for permission to use it on their websites and in broadcasts.

“At first I didn’t expect anything to come out of the video, but it was kind of cool to have these higher sources contact you,” Huneycutt said. “It’s cool to have people say ‘Oh, I saw your video on MSNBC’ or ‘I saw your video on the news in Virginia when I was back home.'”

But Huneycutt said he knows he took risks in setting out on his post-storm adventure, and said he later learned the police had cordoned off the area because of a suspected gas leak.

“I probably shouldn’t be doing stuff like that,” Huneycutt said, laughing.