Families of wildfire victims mired in grief, questioning what more could have been done

The house was burning with her brother-in-law and nephew inside when Jackie McDaniels flagged down a firetruck and begged for help.

"Whoever is in there is no longer alive,” she recalled one of the firemen telling her before urging her to flee her Altadena neighborhood. “I pray to God that they were. But it was horrible to have to leave them there.”

Now McDaniels, like so many, is facing the gripping realities of grief and questions about what more could have been done. Experts say these survivors are victims themselves; the fires that swept through the Los Angeles area this month were fast-moving and fierce.

“It’s really just a different beast of a fire when it’s this propagating entity of just total mayhem,” said Benjamin Hatchett, a fire meteorologist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

But that doesn’t ease the pain or the questions for the families of the more than two dozen killed, some unable to escape, others unaware of what was coming, having survived other blazes unscathed.

Among the dead is Dalyce Curry, who rubbed shoulders with some of the elites of old Hollywood in her youth. To family, she went by a different name.

“Momma Dee, that’s the fire," her granddaughter and namesake, Dalyce Kelley, recalls saying as she drove the 95-year-old to her Altadena home on Jan. 7 after a day of medical tests.

But the flames they saw seemed so far away and power was still on. Now Kelley wishes she would have asked more questions, wishes she would have returned earlier.

“I will live with that regret for the rest of my life,” she said.

That saddens Jennifer Marlon, a wildfire and climate research scientist at Yale’s School of the Environment. She said larger factors were at play, the summer the warmest on record in California, drying out the vegetation that fueled the flames.

“These are, by and large, not situations that people could have really anticipated,” she said. “It’s incredibly tragic that people are blaming themselves and wracked with guilt.”

Yet it is a common response, said Tory Fiedler, a Red Cross disaster mental health manager who is helping to coordinate the response to the wildfires.

“Most of us get our sense of self and value from what we do in service to others,” she said.

“When I’m not able to do that, I feel bad about that,” she added. “I feel guilty that I didn’t get to help. I didn’t do enough. I survived and other people didn’t, and I can’t help them. And it’s not just I survived and other people didn’t, but I don’t know what to do about that.”

Compounding the pain is the fact that many families are still awaiting formal notification from the medical examiner, a process that could take weeks.

During that painful wait, Carol Smith has been praying. Her son, Randy Miod, a 55-year-old surfer, known to friends as Craw Daddy, had lived in his Malibu home for three decades, first as a renter and then the owner. Known as the “Crab Shack,” it was a popular hang-out spot for surfers, with loaner boards always available.

She said he never evacuated for wildfires, including during the Franklin Fire in December that knocked out power to his home for three days.

“I’m scared,” she recalled him telling her the last time they spoke. She begged of him, “Please, go somewhere safe, so I don’t worry.”

But he wasn’t budging, telling her: "I’ve got the hose. And he said, ’Pray for the Palisades and pray for Malibu. And I love you.’”

After human remains were found in the home, a detective told her that the fire was moving five football fields a minute, beyond the scope of what her son anticipated.

In Altadena, cinders were flying as McDaniels packed her car in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 8. Before she left, her late sister's husband, Anthony Mitchell, a 68-year-old amputee who lived nearby, assured her that an ambulance was coming to evacuate him and his 35-year-old son Justin Mitchell, who had cerebral palsy and was bed-bound.

But as she neared the freeway, he called back, telling her, “Stay with me until they get here.”

She pulled over and could hear her nephew, who loved his collection of children's books and watched an eclectic mix of TV shows that included “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and “The Golden Girls,” fretting in the background.

Her brother-in-law was reassuring him: “Daddy’s here. I’m coming. Daddy’s coming. Daddy’s here."

But then the fire was upon them. The last word she heard her brother-in-law mutter was “help” before she sped to his home, black smoke greeting her when she flung open the door.

“You're helpless,” she recalled, saying she nearly got into a wreck herself as she fled, sobbing in the thick smoke, her own home destroyed, too.

She is not quite sure what they could have done. The family thought the ambulance Anthony Mitchell called hours earlier would have arrived in time. Perhaps, had they known it wouldn't, several relatives could have carried her nephew out with sheets, she said.

Her nephew’s younger brother, 33-year-old Jordan Mitchell, lived at home so he could help care for his brother but was hospitalized with sepsis at the time, unable to do anything.

“I very much told myself, I said, ‘I am my brother’s keeper,’ and I’m proud of that," he said, noting that his SUV, which he chose because it fit his father and brother's wheelchairs, survived the flames. "And I was very protective of him. I didn’t think he’d be gone this soon. I figured I’d be taking care of him the rest of my life.”