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