The sister of an Amazon warehouse worker who died in a tornado says she's furious 'the richest company in the world can't keep their employees safe'

• The sister of one of the Amazon warehouse tornado victims said the company failed its employees.
• "The richest company in the world can't keep their employees safe," she told Insider.

The sister of one of the Amazon workers who was killed when a tornado ripped through a company warehouse in Illinois said Tuesday she was furious that the trillion-dollar e-commerce giant couldn't keep its employees safe.

"I'm angry," Rachel Cope, the 28-year-old sister of Clayton Cope, 29, told Insider. "The richest company in the world can't keep their employees safe."

She added: "That's just disgusting."

Clayton Cope, 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, Illinois, 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," Rachel Cope said.

Clayton Cope was in contact with his 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. Friday, his sister said.

Rachel Cope said her dad spoke with her brother on the phone and told him get to the shelter inside of the 1.1 million-square-foot warehouse. She added that Clayton Cope initially refused because he said he wanted to warn others of the looming danger.

She said: "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 afterward, the building collapsed.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from 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," the company said.

Employees had just minutes of warning before the roof of the building collapsed, the company 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 Cope 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 Cope, who said she previously worked at a nearby Amazon warehouse for over a year, said the company should have been better prepared.

"They're a company that is known for not caring about their employees," she said, adding that Amazon treated its employees as "replaceable."

"And that's how they'll feel about my brother," she said. "They'll feel he's replaceable. They don't care."