Wednesday night seemed like a normal evening at the Black Knight Bowbenders archery range, a collection of targets and picnic tables nestled among the towering trees of central New Jersey. Archers gathered for practice, their eyes trained on bull’s-eyes, while nearby almost two dozen boy scouts huddled for a lesson in the shade.

Then a crack of lightning, a deafening boom and a bolt of mayhem as hundreds of millions of volts of electricity coursed through the crowd.

The lightning strike in the town of Jackson on Wednesday killed one person and injured at least 13 more, the victims ranging in age from 7 to 61. The area was under thunderstorm warnings at the time.

But some local residents interviewed on Thursday said they had been unaware of the announcement, and that there had been little sense of imminent danger.

“It was one of those freak accidents,” Mark Machulsky, the president of the Garden State Archers, the sister club of the Black Knight Bowbenders, said on Thursday.

“There were no storms in the area. It was a cloudy night, humid night,” he said. “There were no indications at all.”