What California families saved before wildfires destroyed their homes: Heirlooms, stuffed animals and more

An author’s books, a daughter’s paintings

Jinghuan Liu Tervalon expected to be away from home for only one night.

When a fire broke out in Eaton Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains on the evening of Jan. 7, a friend who is married to a firefighter called Jinghuan and urged her to evacuate, even though the flames didn’t seem close to the three-bedroom bungalow in Altadena she shared with her husband and two kids.

Jinghuan filled suitcases and duffel bags with one night’s worth of clothes and her journals. Her husband, Jervey Tervalon, the author of five novels, packed a few books from his sprawling collection.

Their daughter, Colette, 9, seemed to understand the gravity of the threat ahead of her parents. She took a giant folder of her original artwork, mostly paintings, and loaded her parents’ car with her beloved Minecraft stuffed animals. She also implored Jinghuan to bring a purple coffee mug she received when she went on a writing retreat last year in the Oregon mountains — a token Jinghuan had kept as a reminder of the bliss she felt during the retreat.

“I said: ‘Hey, put this back. We’re not going to need this,’” Jinghuan said. “She said, ‘Mom, if our house burns down, you’re going to be glad I packed that for you.’”

The next morning, Jinghuan and her 17-year-old son, Sam, drove back to their street to grab more items.

“It was 8 o’clock in the morning, but it felt like midnight. It was dark. It was raining ashes. The smoke was everywhere. We saw people panicking,” Jinghuan said. 

Sam was the first to see the devastation. Their bungalow was gone. Jinghuan was stunned.

“It felt like someone poured buckets of cold water on me,” she said. “It was so hard to believe in that moment.”

The four Tervalons are temporarily staying in a rental house in nearby Arcadia, grateful for one another. But their thoughts often drift to what they couldn’t salvage. Jervey wishes he could have taken more of the books he has written and his comic book collection. Sam misses his guitar and piano. Jinghuan regrets there wasn’t time to save more.

“It still pains me that I only grabbed one folder of Colette’s artwork,” she said. “I wake up thinking about the other folder I didn’t get.”

A stuffed bear, a stack of journals

Jianling Horton, a high school senior, was at home working on an essay on the morning of Jan. 7 when she noticed smoke filling the sky outside the window. When she went to ask her parents for feedback on her writing, wind gusts pushed plumes of smoke closer and closer to the Pacific Palisades apartment where she had lived her whole life.

But Jianling didn’t feel scared yet — even when the middle school her 12-year-old sister, Kailing, attends 2 miles away started notifying parents that they needed to pick up their children because of the approaching wildfire.

Jianling’s mother, Sherin Wing, went to get Kailing while Jianling stayed home with her dad, Guy Horton. Outside, the sun turned a glowing red.

As Jianling tried to make sense of what she was seeing, she got a startling text from a friend: Their high school three blocks away was on fire.

“That was when we knew that we had to leave,” Jianling said.

Guy started loading as many meaningful items from around the house as he could into the car. When he got to Sherin’s jewelry cabinet, which was mounted to the wall, he ripped it out so he could pack the whole box — not for the monetary worth of what was inside but because he knew how much sentimental value it had for Sherin. 

Jianling packed a jewelry box, too, that she had inherited from her grandmother. She also took a favorite stuffed bear she had named Toaster and a stack of journals she had kept since the first grade.

“I took all 15 of them and just shoved them in a suitcase, because I figured that if my other life stuff was going to burn, at least I’d still have it in writing,” she said.

Guy, Jianling and the family’s two cats were able to escape in time. Meanwhile, Sherin was able to safely reach Kailing. 

The next day, a neighbor sent them a photo showing their apartment had burned to the ground.

Seeing the photo “was complete and utter grief and loss,” Sherin said. “It’s literally just bits of rubble and lumber.”

The family reunited at a relative’s house in Pasadena, where Jianling’s thoughts turned to what was in the rubble, such as her school textbooks, her paintbrushes and her knitting needles.

But “it’s more about the time that I lost there,” she said. “Especially since I’m going to be leaving for college soon, I really wanted these last few months to be in my childhood home with my family and making plenty of new memories.”

A prayer shawl, Torah verses

As the wildfire approached Rabbi Sholom Diskin’s condominium in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, he packed items so important to him that they almost felt like an extension of himself. He saved his and his wife’s ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract; his tallit, a fringed garment worn as a prayer shawl; his tefillin, a set of small leather boxes each containing scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah; and his tzitzit, the tassels observant Jewish men wear on ceremonial garments. 

“I don’t move around without these things,” he said.

Yet many other objects at the core of his identity needed to be left behind.

“I had 10 bookcases of books. I wasn’t able to take any of them,” he said. “We had some silverware, Shabbat candle lights, two menorahs — including one that was very near and dear to me because it was a gift from my grandparents on my bar mitzvah.”

When he found out that all of those were gone after a neighbor sent a video of where his home of three years once stood, Sholom felt numb.

“Is this really happening, or am I dreaming?” he said he asked himself as he sheltered from the fires at a hotel.

He is on staff at the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades, which sustained some fire damage. The rabbinical leadership there made sure to take sacred Torah scrolls that had been housed inside before the flames approached.

Sholom counts his blessings. He, his wife, Nechama, and their three children, ages 1 to 5, are safe.

“There are people who are mourning right now,” he said. “My job is to be there for them.”

Generations’ worth of artwork

Courtney Tindall, a painter and educator, was thrilled when a home became available for rent in Altadena. She and her partner, Bobak Lotfipour, loved the area’s eclectic arts scene and moved in with their 2-year-old son three months ago. They hadn’t completely unpacked when the Eaton Fire erupted, forcing them to leave the night of Jan. 7.

The electricity cut out as the couple scrambled to assemble their belongings. Courtney, who walked around the house holding a candle so she could see, packed up paintings she couldn’t imagine living without — her own work, pieces by her late grandmother, even a paint-by-numbers image depicting a ballerina that her mom made as a child.

“I’m 42 years old and I’ve had that paint-by-numbers in every apartment I’ve ever lived in,” she said. “I had that in my room as a child growing up.”

The more she prepared to evacuate, the more her sense of imminent danger intensified. The prospect of losing her home grew more real, overwhelming her.

“I could feel my hands shaking,” she said. “There are some things I don’t even remember putting in our bags.”

Bobak, a film and television composer, spent his final minutes at home gathering some of the musical equipment in his recording studio. But the majority of his instruments, including his drums, perished in the blaze.

Days after they fled their home, Courtney still hadn’t wrapped her head around everything they’d lost.

“There were boxes and boxes of stuff we hadn’t even opened after we moved in,” she said. “I make jewelry, and there were boxes of jewelry in the closet, but they didn’t even cross my mind until we left.”

An engraved Christmas gift

Terica Roberts’ Altadena house was where she watched her three sons grow — literally. At the beginning of each school year, she drew lines on the walls to mark the boys’ heights. Every Christmas, Terica added a new homemade ornament to her collection that featured a photo of the family. 

When the flames got close to their house on Jan. 7, the whole household — Terica, her sons and her mother, the family’s two turtles, a lizard and a dog — all headed to the car.

On her way out, Terica grabbed a stack of important records, including medical documents for her 10-year-old son, Grayson, who was born with a congenital eye condition and is legally blind. Grayson took his toy airplanes and a blanket that is special to him, while Terica’s 16-year-old, Gavin, made sure to grab a Christmas present his mom had given to him a couple of weeks before: a black watch that Terica had engraved with the words “Make every moment count.”

The family evacuated to Terica’s brother’s house. The next morning, Terica and her oldest son, Gilbert, 20, returned to their block to find nearly every home on fire or obliterated, including their own.

“I was honestly heartbroken,” Terica said. “You really can’t put it in words. It was unbelievable.”

The family is now staying in a hotel, where Grayson has brought up a few times how much he would like to go home and sleep in his own bed. Gavin has tried cheering him up by pretending they are on vacation.

The family is still coming to terms with everything that burned. Grayson lost a decade’s worth of Braille books and assistive technology devices, Terica said. He also lost his instruments, including his drums, piano, guitars, saxophone and trumpet.