More than two weeks after a fire ripped through Altadena, devastating the northeast Los Angeles community, most residents don't have homes to return to.
For the few Altadenans who do, it may not be safe to live there for some time — if ever.
Fueled by powerful winds, the fast-moving Eaton Fire became the fifth deadliest in California history, resulting in at least 17 deaths. An estimated 9,400 structures — homes, schools, houses of worship and businesses — were destroyed.
But residents worry whether the Altadena they knew — a small and close-knit, racially and economically diverse town in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains — can ever be rebuilt.
For those who lost their homes, the possessions they packed in the hurry to evacuate are now all they have from the time before the fire. Decisions about what to take were rushed and, in some cases, couldn't be made at all. In those frantic final moments, here's what some evacuees took with them before their houses burned to the ground.
'I packed my homework'
When Yoëlle Carter Martínez and her son Pedro Rivera Carter evacuated, they thought they'd be back in a day or two.
"I packed my homework, instead of anything valuable, to do it while I was away for a day," said Pedro, an 18-year-old high school senior.
The family lost their home in the Eaton Fire. The Pasadena school where Yoëlle taught third grade is also gone. Until they figure out what's next, the family will stay at a friend's place in nearby Echo Park.
"I looked at all my valuables and I was like, you know, that'd be really sad if I lost that," Pedro said. "But it's like, well, I'm not going to lose it. And I decided not to bring any of it. I didn't want to be an inconvenience and bring my guitar to my friend's house."
His mom grabbed her books for school the next day. She also saved a colorful scarf that her students knitted for her as a Christmas gift.
"They would knit one part and pass it on to the next person to continue, so the scarf is made out of different kinds of wool, and colors, and it's all uneven, but I love it because it was a labor of love," she said.
In many ways, Yoëlle had been prepared for a wildfire evacuation. She'd gone through training at her school for such emergencies. And she had her ear to early warnings from a local meteorologist who may have saved many lives with his predictions about the fire risk.
But in the chaos, she left behind her purse and important documents she'd packed, including her green card and driver's license. The family left their native Spain to move to Los Angeles 12 years ago.
"Coming to the States also meant leaving everything behind and just having — at that point we had three suitcases," Yoëlle said. "But it wasn't as traumatic as this was, you know, this was just from one moment to the next, just pack everything and go."
She says what's most important remains.
"Even if we hadn't brought anything, we're still here," Yoëlle said. "We have lost the house. We haven't lost our home," she said. "We lost our school, the building, but we haven't lost the school community."
A personalized Bible
Brandon Walker made sure to take his Bible with him when he fled the fire. The 27-year-old had the book customized with his name and favorite scripture.
"That one meant a lot to me," Walker said. "I started getting a lot more into my relationship with Jesus Christ in about 2021," he said. "I started reading the Bible every day and it's just been a big factor in helping me to make a lot of changes in my life that I felt like I had to make."
It was around that time he decided to finish getting the credits he needed to earn his bachelor's degree. In 2023, he became a first-generation college graduate.
The home where he lived with his mother is now gone. Walker's church, where he works as a bookkeeper, survived. Before it became a church, it was a school that his mom and his aunt attended as kids.
Walker's ties to the Altadena-Pasadena area go back decades. Like many African American families who settled in the area during the Great Migration, his grandfather moved to Altadena from Tennessee in the late 1960s. When housing discrimination was outlawed during the civil rights era, white families left the area and the population of Black homeowners grew in Altadena. Those historically Black neighborhoods went up in flames, displacing residents like Walker and his mother.
For now, they're staying in the San Fernando Valley area with his aunt.
Walker said he has not had a good night's sleep since the fires. He's leaning on his faith for support.
"I believe that God has a plan for all of us. He's leading me where I'm going to be or where I need to be," he said.
One of Walker's goals had been to become more financially independent and move out of his mom's house.
"You know, you don't want to be under your parents' roof forever," he said. "Granted, this isn't the way I thought that this was gonna happen."
An unexpected keepsake survives
Music brought husband and wife Christopher Still and Amanda McIntosh together. The couple met in Spain through a summer program with the Boston Symphony. They've since passed on their love of classical music to their 12- and 14-year-old sons.
But when they had to evacuate their Altadena home, they didn't bring a single one of their 20-plus instruments.
"Not even a trumpet," said Still, a trumpet player with the LA Philharmonic.
Still said the family had about five minutes to get out the door. He knocked on the neighbors' doors to warn them of the danger and then got the family dogs in the car.
McIntosh grabbed her 2025 planner. The mother of two also runs an eco-beauty business she founded, does some marketing consulting, and freelances as a clarinetist for various classical music orchestras. The planner helps her keep her busy life together.
"I lost it once before and I felt like I was missing my brain," she said.
The family landed at a short-term rental in East Pasadena and will soon move to a rental they secured through a music connection. As she and her husband work through insurance filings and, eventually, will have their hands full with a plan to rebuild on the same lot, McIntosh said she's never needed her planner more.
"I will be juggling more tasks than ever before," she said. "It helps me get things done while not losing sight of the larger goals, priorities, dreams. It's like all my previous planner use was training for now."
An unexpected keepsake also ended up coming with them. At the bottom of her son's backpack, she found a tiny, framed photo of McIntosh and Still from around the time they first met, in the mid-1990s, while they were living in Spain.
She's not quite sure why it ended up there, but she was heartened to discover it in the "weird treasure trove" her younger son had amassed, especially after getting confirmation from a neighbor that their house wouldn't make it.
"My child likes to collect little things, little mementos, and he never cleans out his backpack," she said. "I think to the kid, having like a little framed picture of his parents feels big."
It's the only photographic evidence she has of them during that time in their life.
Whereas she's usually trying to curb her son's pack-rat tendencies, she said, this time was different.
"I'm just so grateful that I didn't ask the kid what was in the backpack and I let him bring as much as he wanted."
Eight pets and two right shoes
Four months ago, 27-year-old Lexie Dreyfuss bought her first home. She'd just finished renovations on the Altadena property the weekend before that house was lost in the fire.
"It was a dream home and a dream location. It was everything that I could have asked for," she said. "I absolutely imagined myself being there forever, and being close to family. That was my hope."
It was a dream she thought she had been priced out of.
"I'm not married. It's a single income situation, and I'm a special ed teacher — you don't make a ton of money," said Dreyfuss, who teaches blind and visually impaired students at schools across LA. "I had kind of given up hope on the possibility of affording the area … and this home came up. I was in the right place at the right time."
She plans to rebuild on that same lot and stay close to family. She considers herself fortunate.
"Yes, I lost my stuff. My roommate lost her stuff," she said. "We lost four months of memories and a lot of yelling at each other and laughing and trying to figure out our lives together. But we didn't lose 50 years of memory in that house, and there are so many people in our community that lost so much more than we did."
If she had waited for an evacuation notice, she says, she and her roommate may not have escaped with their pets safely. When she saw the blaze from her front door, she grabbed her cats, nine-month-old rescued siblings Piper and Peter, three dogs and three puppies.
In the rush to evacuate, she forgot to put on real shoes.
"I had walked out of my house in slippers," she said. "Our priority was the animals. But when we left that night, the thought of us not having a home to come back to never crossed our mind."
After leaving Altadena, she went to evacuate her mother, about two miles away in La Cañada Flintridge. That's where was able to grab herself a pair of tennis shoes. Or so she thought.
About two days later, she realized she had grabbed two right shoes.
"I went to put them on Thursday morning and I went, 'Of course this would happen to me.' Like, I don't have two right feet," she said.
She went shoe shopping with her mom. While trying on a pair, she started to break down in the store. The employee who brought her the shoes asked her mom if she was OK.
"My mom told her what had happened, and the woman ended up giving me the shoes for free. And then I just started bawling," Dreyfuss said. "It's things like that. It's that generosity of complete strangers that is going so far right now."
Hope through music
Mason Swinnie was on a video call with his friend when he saw the reflection of the blazes flickering in her eyes. When she turned the camera around, he said, the fire looked as close as a block away. She was a few streets down from him, closer to where the fire broke out.
"That's when I knew how serious it actually was, so I told her, 'Look, you need to get out of the house,' " he said.
Swinnie, 25, was home alone at the time. He called his brother and his dad to have them drive home as soon as possible to get their cars. With enough time to grab a few valuables of his own, he packed some of his music equipment, including his DJ controller, speakers and an electric guitar.
"Even at this time, I'm still thinking like everyone's houses are gonna be OK, you know, the firefighters gonna be there to put out the fire," he said.
His family survived, but his house — the home he grew up in — didn't. For now, he and his father are staying at a short-term rental in Monterey Park.
"The thing that stings the most is, the community, the environment, the feeling of the city that I grew up in will forever be changed," he said.
He lost his piano, a mixer and notebooks full of lyrics he'd written over the years.
Swinnie has been releasing his own music for about eight years, mostly in the R&B and indie genres. The garage he turned into a music studio for himself and his brother is also gone. It was a hub of activity that brought people together, he said.
"That's wiped from existence, and that hurts," he said. "That was a home base for a lot of artists. They could come and record there. Or I could teach them what I know — people who didn't have access to the equipment that I had."
But some of the friendships formed in that space, he said, are what's helping him get through this time.
"This situation would be so much harder and so much more stressful if it wasn't for the people around me who are reaching out and looking out for me and my family," he said.
Music, he said, will help him process his grief. He plans to make a song in tribute to Altadenans and what they lost.
"I'll definitely be, going forward, making music around this whole entire situation. Something that will bring hope," he said.
Copyright 2025 NPR
