Smoke choked the foothills. It wasn't night yet, but the sky had gone black.
Christy Lee gripped the steering wheel with both hands as she crept down the familiar road, dodging fallen branches and smoldering debris. Her family’s house was gone—a generation of memories and shelter razed by fire in mere moments. She stared at the scorched frame, the collapsed roof, the ghost of her life in embers.
Christy sat frozen, hands trembling on the steering wheel, ash drifting like snow across the windshield. And then, through the dark, swirling smoke, a shape poked through like daybreak after a long, desperate night. The back house was still standing.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. For the first time since the fire started, something in her chest loosened. Hope.
“It was crazy,” she tells me. “Then I decided to go check on the family business.”
That was January 9, 2025, two days after the unprecedented Eaton Fire swept through Altadena. Christy headed south toward Fair Oaks Avenue, the formerly bustling commercial hub where her family’s decades-old burger joint stood.