As deputies searched a west Altadena senior home the morning of Jan. 8, the Eaton fire raged around them.
Evacuation orders for the area had been issued hours earlier, and the facility appeared evacuated — but the team wanted to be certain because they had already found an elderly woman trying to leave the facility to walk her dog, oblivious to the encroaching blaze.
“Each window that we looked out, we were like, ‘The fire is coming,’” Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Quinn Alkonis said. “We could see flames all around. It was scary, but we knew we had a job to do and make sure that nobody was left behind.”
After ensuring the dog walker was safe, Alkonis and other deputies scoured the MonteCedro senior care community with flashlights, knocking on doors, yelling down hallways. When they reached the third floor, they heard a weak voice.
“Don’t lose me,” a woman using a walker said to the deputies. The 100-year-old told them she was lost and that her hearing aids weren’t charged, according to video from the officers’ body-worn cameras.
“She was obviously exerting herself to get out of the building,” Alkonis said, remembering how the woman was short of breath and her nose running. We were “just shocked that she was there, but we were relieved that we found her.”
With backup on the way, Alkonis and her partner Deputy Nicholas Martinez led both women to safety and checked that no one else was inside.
“If we weren’t there, who knows what would have happened to her?” Alkonis said Wednesday morning, as she recalled the situation from earlier this month.
The chaotic rescue at the senior community further underscores the widespread issues and concerns about evacuations on the west side of Altadena, where orders to leave came almost 10 hours after those issued for residents living east of North Lake Avenue, according to a Times investigation.
At least 17 people died in the fire; all were found west of Lake Avenue. Western Altadena never received evacuation warnings that night, and evacuation orders there didn’t come until about 3:30 a.m. or later — well after flames were threatening the area.
County officials have called for an external review into the evacuation alerts and why west Altadena’s came so late.
The MonteCedro facility is just west of North Lake Avenue, in an evacuation zone that received the order at 5:42 a.m. on Jan. 8 — the area’s latest notices to leave, according to records of archived alerts.
But officials for Episcopal Communities & Services, the nonprofit that runs the MonteCedro facility, said that even before that order came down, its team started evacuating residents just after 4 a.m., in conjunction with the L.A. County Fire Department and Sheriff’s Department. Around 6 a.m., radio traffic from the area called for more help evacuating a “four-story convalescent home” at the address of the MonteCedro community.
The nonprofit said it used eight city buses and two facility buses to transfer residents and staff to the Pasadena Convention Center, arriving shortly after 7 a.m., according to a statement.
“Fire personnel and MonteCedro team members made two complete tours through the building, which included triggering the fire alarm and inspecting every residence,” the statement said. “However, two independent living residents were not encountered and did not make it to the buses.”
Deputies Nicholas Martinez, left, and Quinn Alkonis talk about their experience rescuing seniors from the MonteCedro Retirement Community during the Eaton fire.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
ECS staff realized the two residents — the woman trying to walk her dog and the 100-year-old woman found inside — were missing about the same time the deputies found them, around 9:30 a.m., the statement said. They said it remains unclear why the two women “were not encountered in the first or second sweeps of the building.”
“Successfully moving nearly 200 people, some with cognitive issues or other impairments, away from their homes in a couple of hours is cause to give thanks,” ECS’ chief executive James Rothrock said in a statement. “Having said that, we have discovered gaps in our planning and execution that we are working to understand and correct. Like hundreds of agencies and institutions in the Los Angeles area, we were faced with an unprecedented challenge, and our response to it merits a deep, unvarnished review.”
Jason Montiel, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Social Services, which licensed MonteCedro most recently in 2023, said the agency is conducting an investigation into what happened at the facility, but declined to comment further.
Alkonis and Martinez said they were dispatched to that location around 9 a.m. — about three hours after evacuation orders were issued — to check on the area, and were not given information about any prior efforts to clear the facility.
“We understood going in that it was such a chaotic situation — who knows what happened before we got there — but we’re just glad we were there,” Alkonis said. “It’s our job to go in there and make sure that they’re gonna get out.”
All of the deputies who spoke with The Times on Wednesday declined to comment on the evacuation process before they arrived or after they left. Martinez and Alkonis, who are typically based in Carson, said that during their search they didn’t find other staff or residents.
LASD officials did not immediately respond to questions about any further investigation that may be launched into how the two women were left behind.
While the senior care facility survived the fire, it experienced some minor fire damage, according to the county’s damage assessments. But all around it, several homes have been destroyed.
“It could have been very bad,” Martinez said. “There was a moment of fear seeing that every corner was on fire, but in the back of my mind, … we had to make sure that everyone got out.”
