Human Remains Found Six Months after Historic CA Wildfire

While Katherine Alcantara was evacuating from her smoke-filled west Altadena home during January's firestorm, she remembered seeing her longtime neighbor returning home across the street.

In the chaos, she assumed he had come back to rescue his pets and grab some important belongings before heading to safety.

She never imagined he wouldn't make it out.

"I remember hearing the dogs barking hysterically. ... Did he try to save the house? Did he pass out?" Alcantara, 45, recalled this week in an interview with The Times. "I can't believe they found the body now, like six months later."

Officials this week confirmed the presence of human remains in the only uncleared lot on La Venezia Court, a small residential block where neighbors said 74-year-old Juan Francisco Espinoza had lived alone with his dogs. The confirmation of another fatality brings the Eaton fire death toll to 19 and the overall death toll from the Jan. 7 firestorm, including the Palisades fire, to 31. All but one of the Eaton fire deaths occurred in west Altadena, where evacuation orders for residents came hours after the fire had already arrived, according to a Times investigation.

The neighborhood where Espinoza lived received the most delayed evacuation orders, with electronic alerts going out to his section of west Altadena just before 6 a.m. on Jan. 8 — almost 12 hours after the fire started. About a mile to the east, where the community is generally more affluent and less diverse, electronic evacuation orders were sent out about an hour after the fire broke out just after 6 p.m. Jan. 7, according to records of archived alerts.

Alcantara said she got the county's electronic evacuation order on her phone after waking up to thick smoke and fire alarms going off.

"We got the warning when the roof is literally on fire," Alcantara recalled. "I could barely breathe, my eyes were burning. ... Why did they evacuate so late?"

She worries that, because of the late alerts, Espinoza didn't have enough time to get out.

"A lot of people died because of the alerts," Alcantara said. "It just feels like … they didn't really care about us.

"I just feel bad," she said. "That wasn't the way to go."

Over the last month, workers spent several days searching Espinoza's lot, eventually gathering enough evidence of "essentially cremated remains" to confirm that somebody died there, said Emily Tauscher, the assistant chief of investigations and transport for the Los Angeles County medical examiner. It could now take months to positively identify the body, she said.

"These are challenging situations. It's labor intensive," Tauscher said. "We're dealing with highly fragmented skeletal remains."

Typically, the medical examiner's office is called to a scene after law enforcement determines there is a "compelling concern" about a death at a specific location, kicking off a long, complicated search, often involving major debris removal and cadaver dogs who detect human remains, she said.

In this case, Tauscher said the medical examiner began working with law enforcement in June after a neighbor filed a missing person report for Espinoza in May. It appears he had no living family members, according to neighbors and a search of public records.

Tauscher said circumstances around a death, such as having no immediate family or next of kin, can further complicate the already difficult search and identification process, which requires slow, meticulous work. Although victims in other major, deadly fires were recovered within a few weeks, Tauscher said she's not surprised there have been a few late discoveries in the Eaton fire. In April, her team also confirmed human remains at a different location in Altadena.

"This is not unexpected for when you have something to this scale," Tauscher said. "It will take time to be able to get through."

With that said, there is hope the remains found this week will be the last.

Los Angeles police said there were no missing persons reports outstanding from the Palisades fire, and Espinoza is the last person considered missing from the Eaton fire, said Ethan Marquez, the acting captain of the Altadena station for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

"They're coming into the final stages of abating properties," he said. "We're almost cleared of everything."

The remains found on Espinoza's property are the last unidentified remains from the January firestorm, after officials last week announced they'd identified a Palisades fire victim as Marilyn Hamilton, 71. Her remains were found in January, but Tauscher said the medical examiner's office had to make its conclusion based on circumstantial evidence because the condition of Hamilton's remains complicated the identification.

Some neighbors, however, questioned why it took so long to find the remains from the rubble of Espinoza's home.

Chiquita Waters, who lived next door to Espinoza, said she waited for weeks for officials to search his property or his name to turn up on the medical examiner's site. No one from their close-knit block had seen him since the fire, and his lot remained untouched, with no visits by FEMA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she said.

About three months after the fire, she said she tried to do her own search to find family members or employers of Espinoza but without luck.

She finally tried to report him missing to the Sheriff's Department in mid-April, she said, but the department initially didn't complete the report.

"It felt like nobody was hearing me or taking me serious," Waters said. But in May, she said she had better luck after meeting Marquez at an event. She told him about her missing neighbor.

"Somebody needed to report him," said Waters, 74. "He was a human being."

In a statement, officials with the sheriff's Altadena station said the department began looking into the possibility of a missing person when it was first reported, doing a property check and utilizing other department resources. Efforts were made to complete the report, but there was an issue with the contact information of the person who filed it, the statement said; once that person contacted the station again, the report was completed. The department emphasized that deputies "take all reports of missing persons seriously and are committed to conducting thorough investigations."

On May 21, the Sheriff's Department shared a bulletin about Espinoza, detailing that he was last seen on Jan. 7 in the fire zone wearing blue overalls.

The statement from the Altadena sheriff's station was also clear that a missing person report isn't required to jumpstart an on-the-ground search.

"Search and rescue personnel, along with cadaver K9's, have previously conducted grid searches of burn areas for possible human remains," the sheriff's station statement said.

In this case, Tauscher said the medical examiner's Special Operations Response Team first got to the property in June, where they found significant debris, including a collapsed roof, that had to be removed before they could begin sifting through the rubble. After that, her team could begin looking for remains, which often required them to sift through rubble on their hands and knees for hours.

"We are very methodical when it comes to trying to do as comprehensive a search as possible," Tauscher said. "We're talking fragments of bone."

She said the process is often quicker in cases with local family who can advocate for their loved ones or provide detailed information that can aid in the search. It's much more challenging when they are relying on limited missing persons reports requiring widespread property searches.

When and if remains are found, Tauscher said that kicks off the second stage in the challenging process: "identifying these charred, highly fragmented remains."

There are certain factors can speed this along, such as finding medical equipment that can be matched with medical records or enough teeth that can be compared to dental records, she said. They have also been able to utilize rapid DNA testing, but that requires finding remains intact enough to do the tests and potential family members with which to compare the findings, she said.

"It all depends on the quality of the remains," Tauscher said.

Neighbors said they knew little about Espinoza, explaining that he mostly kept to himself during his 20 years living on the block. He religiously went to work every morning dressed in coveralls, Alcantara said, though she only ever knew him to work as a notary. His longtime partner died a few years ago, she said, and otherwise, he didn't have any close relatives. He was from El Salvador, she said.

"He'd just go to work early, come back late, just wave hi and bye, that's it," Alcantara said.

Leticia Serafin, who lives about block away, said Espinoza moved in a few years after she did almost 25 years ago.

"He just kept to himself," Serafin, 51, said. "It's definitely really hard to hear [about his death], because you know what? We had no warnings to evacuate whatsoever."

She's still frustrated that she saw no officials giving warnings or helping people evacuate, even as smoke and flames filled their neighborhood.

"They all have sirens, they all have speakers," she said. "We never heard anything."

Andrew Becerra, another neighbor, said he stayed behind on their block, even after the delayed evacuation order went out. He said he ran around trying to save homes — and was successful — until there was no more water in the lines.

"It bothers me because I think I could have saved him," Becerra, 38, said. He said he had no idea that Espinoza was still home as the fire spread.

"I didn't want to turn my back onto nothing," Becerra said, shaking his head. "Maybe if I acted sooner, maybe I could have gave him a chance."

Like many other west Altadena residents have noted, Becerra said he didn't see any firefighters in the area as he tried to save homes. A Times investigation showed fire trucks were largely not in west Altadena during the first 12 hours of the fire.

But just learning Espinoza's likely fate has brought solace for some, who were burdened with the mystery of what happened to their quiet, quirky neighbor.

"In a way, I do feel a sense of, well now we know he's gone," Waters said, mentioning that she now hopes his lot will be cleared. "God rest his soul."

Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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