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Catherine Alcantara had been evacuated from a smoke-filled home in West Altadena during the January fire, but she recalled seeing her longtime neighbor return home across the street.
In the midst of the chaos, she thought he had returned to rescue his pet and grab some important belongings before heading to safety.
She never imagined he wouldn’t make it.
“I remember hearing a dog barking hysterically. …Did he try to save the house? Has he passed out?” Alcantara, 45, recalled this week in an interview with the Times. “I can’t believe they’ve found their bodies now, like six months later.”
Authorities confirmed the presence of human remains this week in the only unknown lot at the La Venice Courthouse, a small residential block where neighbors 74-year-old Juan Francisco Espinoza lived alone with a dog. Another fatality confirmation brings the Eton fire death toll to 19, bringing the overall death toll since the January 7th fire to 31.
The neighbourhood where Espinoza lived received the most late evacuation order, with an electronic alert in the Western Altadena section just before 6am on January 8th, almost 12 hours after the fire began. According to archived alert records, the community is generally more wealthy and less diverse, with electronic evacuation orders being sent about an hour after the fire broke out.
A recent aerial view of the Altadena neighborhood shows the cleaned and cleared facilities.
(Allen J. Scheven/Los Angeles Times)
Alcantara said he received the county electronic evacuation order over the phone after awakening to thick smoke and a fire alarm.
“I was warned when the roof was literally burning,” recalls Alcantara. “I could barely breathe, my eyes were burning… why did they evacuate so late?”
She is worried that Espinoza didn’t have enough time to leave due to the slow alert.
“A lot of people died because of the alert,” Alcantara said. “It was just… they didn’t really care about us.
“I feel bad,” she said. “That wasn’t the way to go.”
Last month, workers searched the Espinoza lot for several days and gathered sufficient evidence of “essentially cremated bodies” to confirm that someone had ultimately died there, said Emily Tausher, assistant chief of investigation and transport for Los Angeles County medical inspectors. She said it could take months to actively identify her body.
“These are challenging situations. It’s labor-intensive,” Tausher said. “We deal with highly fragmented skeletal ruins.”
Typically, the medical inspector’s office is called to the scene after law enforcement determines there are “persuasive concerns” about deaths at a particular location.
In this case, Tausher said medical inspectors began working with law enforcement in June after the neighbor filed a report of Espinoza’s missing persons in May. A search of neighbors and public records suggests he had no living family.
Toucher said the circumstances surrounding death, including the absence of close relatives and close relatives, could further complicate the already challenging search and identification processes that require slow and meticulous work. Other major casualties said the fatal fire was recovered within weeks, but Tausher said he was not surprised that some late discoveries were made in the Eton fire. In April, her team confirmed the human body elsewhere in Altadena.
“This is not unexpected if you have something on this scale,” Tausher said. “It takes time to get through.”
That being said, I hope that the last ruins found this week will be the last.
Los Angeles police said outstanding reports from the Parisades fire that no one is missing, and Espinoza is the last person to be considered missing from the Eton Fire, said Ethan Marquez, acting captain of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Altadena Station.
“They’re coming into the final stage of softening their property,” he said. “We’re exempt from almost everything.”
The remains found on Espinoza’s property are the last unidentified ruins since the January fire. 71 after officials announced last week that they had identified the victim of the Palisade fire as Marilyn Hamilton.
However, some neighbors wondered why it took so long to find the artefact from the tiled ble in Espinoza.
Chiquita Waters, who lived next to Espinoza, said he had waited weeks for staff to search for their property or his name and appear on the medical examiner’s website. No one on their close block saw him since the fire, and his lot remained his lot without a visit by FEMA or the US Army Corps of Engineers, she said.
Approximately three months after the fire, she tried to search for Espinoza’s family and employer, but said she had no luck.
She ultimately tried to report him missing to the Sheriff’s Department in mid-April, but she said, but the department did not complete the initial report.
“It felt like no one was listening to me or taking me seriously,” Waters said. However, in May, she said she had better luck after meeting Marquez at the event. She told him about her missing neighbor.
“Someone had to report him,” Waters said. “He was a human.”
In a statement, sheriff’s Altadena station officials said they began investigating the possibility of missing persons when the department was first reported, conducting property checks and began utilizing resources from other departments. Efforts have been made to complete the report, but there were issues with the contact information of the person who submitted it, the statement said. When the person contacted the station again, the report was completed. The department emphasized that the deputies “take all reports of missing persons seriously and are committed to conducting a thorough investigation.”
On May 21, the Sheriff’s Office shared a breaking news about Espinoza, detailing the last seen in the fire zone on January 7th wearing blue overalls.
A statement from the Altadena Sheriff station was also clear that reports of the missing persons were not necessary to begin a ground search.
“Search and rescue personnel, along with the corpse K9, had previously conducted a grid search of burn areas for human bodies,” the sheriff’s statement said.
The wreckage was found in the Altadena Lotto, home to Juan Francisco Espinoza.
(LASD)
In this case, Tauscher said the medical inspector’s special operations response team first reached the facility in June and found important debris, including the collapsed roof. Her team was then able to begin searching for the body. It often required them to sift the cleavage bleeds on their hands and knees for hours.
“We’re very systematic when it comes to trying to do the most comprehensive search possible,” Toucher said. “We’re talking about bone fragments.”
She said the process is often quick for local families who can advocate for loved ones or provide detailed information that will help them search. It is much more challenging if they rely on limited missing person reports.
If the wreckage is found, Tausher said he will kick off the second stage in a challenging process.
The fence surrounds the sunny lot of Altadena. Espinoza was the last person to be considered missing by Eton Fire, officials said.
(Allen J. Scheven/Los Angeles Times)
There are certain factors that can speed up this, such as finding medical devices that can match enough teeth to compare to medical records and dental records, she said. They also managed to utilize rapid DNA testing, but she said, they need to discover that it remains sufficient to perform tests and potential families to compare findings.
“It all depends on the quality of the ruins,” Tausher said.
Neighbors say he knew little about Espinoza and explained that he had mostly defended himself during his 20 years of living in the block. He went to work every morning wearing a coverall, Alcantara said, but she never knew he would work as a notary. His longtime partner passed away a few years ago, she said, and otherwise he would not have a close relative. He was from El Salvador, she said.
“He’s just going to work early, coming back late, just hi and goodbye, that’s all,” Alcantara said.
Leticia Seraphine, who lives close by, said Espinoza moved in a few years after he went almost 25 years ago.
“He just stayed with himself,” said Seraphine, 51. “It’s definitely really difficult to hear [about his death]because you know what? There were no warnings to evacuate at all. ”
She is still frustrated that even if smoke and flames fill the neighborhood, she hasn’t seen an alert or an official helping people get evacuated.
“They all have sirens, they all have speakers,” she said. “We’ve never heard anything.”
Another neighbor, Andrew Becerra, said he was behind their block, even after the evacuation order was delayed. He said he ran around trying to save the house until there was no more water on the line – he was successful.
“I think I could have saved him, so that bothers me,” said Becerra, 38. He said he didn’t know Espinoza was still at home as the fire spread.
“I didn’t want anything to do with my back,” Becerra said, shook her head. “If I had acted earlier, I could have given him a chance.”
As many other Western Altadena residents pointed out, Becerra said he didn’t see firefighters in the area because he tried to save the house. A Times investigation showed that during the first 12 hours of the fire, the fire truck was barely Western Altadena.
But learning the possibility of Espinoza’s fate brings comfort to those who are troubled by the mystery of what happened to their quiet, eccentric neighbors.
“In a way, I feel the feeling because I know he’s gone,” Waters said. “God will rest his soul.”
Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.
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