Armenian Mother's Desperate Plea to Save Her Daughter's Cherished Bunny from the Eaton Fire That Completely Destroyed Their Home

Life is often measured not just by the moments we experience, but by the places and people that anchor those moments in memory. The Espinoza family’s home on La Solana Drive was one such anchor, a haven of love, history, and connection for an extended family bound by multi-cultural traditions and care. When the Eaton Fire threatened to destroy this sanctuary, the family’s story became one of resilience, courage, and the power of shared humanity. This is the story of a tragic night that tested their bonds, brought cherished memories to the forefront, and revealed the profound significance of a home..

The story is told by the Talin’s little brother Ara Astourian, Zabdiel’s (Koe’s) brother-in-law, and Zabel (9) and Lilit’s (7) uncle. 

On Tuesday evening, January 7, the Espinozas were at their home on La Solana Drive, just north of Altadena Golf Course. They were watching Wicked and the girls were singing along to “Defying Gravity” when the power went out. Pitch black. This wasn’t unexpected. We’d all been anticipating the windy conditions, and the Santa Anas were particularly strong that evening. But then a helicopter flew over the Ezpinozas’ home, low enough to rattle their windows and shake their walls. Talin, who grew up in nearby Kinneloa Mesa, knew what that could mean. She immediately called our cousins Kristin and Austin to tell them that they’d lost internet access and needed to know if there was a fire in the area. There was—a brush fire in Eaton Canyon.

The Espinozas hadn’t received an evacuation order yet, but Eaton Canyon was just a mile away, so they probed around in the dark, trying to collect valuables and pajamas. In the rush, Talin left her engagement ring behind. Within minutes, the Espinozas had evacuated. 

How was it that the Espinozas, like all the other families huddled in cars around them, understood the danger well enough to leave, and yet never imagined that their home might actually burn to the ground? Because we’d all done this before. Many times. We leave as a precaution, not as a goodbye. And when it’s safe enough to return, life goes on. Still, as the Espinozas made their way down Allen Avenue, the dark orange sky and the crack of flames on the mountainside were unnerving.

The cars on Allen came to a standstill. Tensions ran high. Anxiety and fear morphed into rage. Drivers in idling cars slammed on their horns and shouted at each other. The Espinozas tried to head down side streets to get out of the crunch, but every attempt failed because of a fallen branch or tree. What should have been a short trip to the 210 ended up taking an hour. Even when they got there, a brush fire on the side of the freeway brought them to a standstill again. So the Espinozas just sat there, staring at the flames in the bushes and staring at the embers in the air.

A few hours later, while my wife, Lilit, and I were making our own escape, I got a chance to call Talin. By this point, the Espinozas had made it to Koe’s mom’s home in La Puente. Talin was anxiously checking social media for reliable evidence of the fire’s advance. By 11:00 p.m., there were posts indicating that houses were burning on Midlothian, less than a mile away from the Espinozas’ home. By 11:30, houses were burning on Homewood, just a few blocks away.

Talin and I were both in different parts of Los Angeles County, but we were in similar situations: wide awake in our beds, scrolling through our phones, hoping for the best, but imagining the worst. After refreshing the fire maps a thousand times, I told her, “I can’t think straight anymore.” Talin said, “I’m sad, and I’m scared. It’s in God’s hands now.”

As soon as the sun came up, the Espinozas’ close friend and business associate Jeff drove over to Altadena to check on the house of another friend named Brad. Brad then helped Jeff get to Talin’s house by phone, guiding him there from memory, turn-by-turn. Jeff navigated past fallen trees, downed power lines, and burning houses, but he finally made it to the Espinozas’ home on La Solana. When he arrived, he found that the Hos’ home, right next door, was fully engulfed by flames. The Espinozas’ home, though, like a handful of others on the street, still looked pretty good. But as Jeff walked up the driveway, he noticed flames shooting out of the attic at the rear eave of the house, above Zabel and Lilit’s bedroom.

Jeff immediately called Talin to give her the heartwrenching news. But when she picked up, all he could say was, “Tal . . .” Talin responded, “Jeff – what is it?” Jeff said: “Talin . . .” Talin, disturbed by Jeff’s hesitation, broke: “What? What?! What!? What is it!? Jeff, what’s going on!? Tell me what’s going on!”

“It’s over. It’s on fire right now. It’s going down. Do I have your permission to break in? Do you want me to try to save anything?” Talin said the first thing that came to mind: “My daughter has a stuffed bunny on the second floor.”

Then it hit her what Jeff was about to do. Concerned for the well-being of her dear friend, Talin took it all back, screaming and begging: “Jeff, don’t go in there! Please, don’t go! Just get out of there. Don’t risk your life for this! Please!” The call dropped. But Brad called Jeff and told him to try save the Espinozas’ pet bunnies too.

Jeff had been a volunteer firefighter with the City of Sierra Madre in the early 90s. He’d fought many wildfires along our foothills, including the Kinneloa Fire in 1993, the big one that left enduring marks on both the face of the San Gabriels and the Astourian kids’ developing hearts and minds. Jeff had also fought many structure fires. Many times before, he’d been a home’s final guest, equal parts welcome visitor and unwelcome visitor. Here he was again, many years later, a volunteer firefighter for the Espinoza family. Jeff dug deep, summoning all of his firefighting experience and training, he accessed all of his courage and strength, and he kicked down the Espinozas’ front door. 

He rushed up the stairs, gliding over the distinctive Talavera tiles on each step, and entered Zabel and Lilit’s bedroom. The room was 50 degrees hotter than the rest of the house, and Jeff could feel the fire in the attic pulsing above him. He knew his time was limited and that the roof could cave in at any moment. He grabbed up as many stuffed animals as he could, and he whisked past the class photos hanging on the walls. He entered Talin and Koe’s bedroom and grabbed a handful of jewelry from Talin’s nightstand as drops of sweat rolled off his forehead. He took a final video of the interior, then went out to the backyard. There, Jeff found the bunnies, Sugar, Snowball, and Wild, in their hutch. But the hutch was too big for his SUV, so he found an ice chest in the garage and used it to make the rescue. 

By that point, La Solana was surrounded by a fire storm, and Jeff knew he had to leave. He shot one final video of the exterior, focused on the flames coming out of the attic, said there was nothing he could do to stop them, and escaped to safety.

When Talin received Jeff’s video, she had a panic attack. She called me and told me what was happening, but she could barely speak. I fought back tears, steadied my voice, and told her to breathe. But she knew what she needed: she needed to let herself lose it over what was happening. And she did. It killed me to hear it. 

My wife Lilit and I immediately left her parents’ house in Lake View Terrace and made our way back to Allen Avenue. As we drove past friends’ homes, Lilit texted them, letting them know that their properties were still safe. When we made it up to New York Drive, we were surprised to find that, other than the swirling ash and smoke, things seemed relatively normal. By the time we got to Mendocino Street, we were wondering how the fire had even reached the Espinozas’ home.

Then, out of nowhere, a chimney, surrounded by flames and crumbling walls. We both immediately reacted: “Oh my God . . .” After that point, every third or fourth home was gone. We started to see sagging power lines and burning telephone poles. And we started to see firefighters. They looked dazed—completely exhausted. 

Some of the firefighters were working on an enormous tree that had fallen across Mendocino, so we decided to head up Braeburn, but the house on the corner of Braeburn was burning so intensely that I hesitated. I told Lilit that we might have to turn back, but she pointed out that the street was clear, so we pushed forward. 

In Jeff’s final video, there had been flames in the attic, but the Espinozas’ home was still intact. When we arrived, we found the place completely transformed. The fire had twisted and bent the dark green shutters that had been fixed there since 1926. The wooden balcony surrounding the girls’ bedroom had collapsed. The roof had caved in. The dining room was on fire.

Moments later, we caught sight of the girls’ playroom, just beyond the dining room. What we saw paralyzed us: a terrifying fire, flames as high as the ceiling, framed by the playroom’s beautiful, arched doorway. We both broke down.

The curtains to the living room were shut and hadn’t yet caught fire. Our family’s piano, the one we’d all learned to play on as kids, the one our nieces Zabel and Lilit practiced on now, the one Talin, the true pianist in our family, had a special bond with, was in there. I wanted to know if it was still okay. I wanted to know if the unity paintings from Talin and Koe’s wedding were still hanging on the wall. I wanted to know if Lilit’s ukeleles were still whole. But our view was blocked, and it was too dangerous to exit the car and approach. We had to keep moving, so we did. As we drove, we cried and comforted each other and prayed.

We made it up to Sahag-Mesrob Armenian Christian School. Our older brother Sevag, Talin, and I had all attended this school. This was where we’d memorized Armenian poems and songs and dances, and trembled our way through performances for families and friends. And this was where Zabel and Lilit now went to school, having their own experience of it as two brilliant, beautiful, Mexican-Armenian-American girls. The school was in ruins. The chapel was gone. The classrooms were gone. The library, the offices, and the teachers’ lounge were gone. The distinctive stone pillars were standing, but where a schooldesk, tricycle, or playset had survived, it was completely deformed and charred.

As we drove away, we started to feel unsafe and decided we had to leave the area as quickly as possible. We met up with our cousins Mike and Lori and found a way out of the neighborhood together, praying that any falling telephone pole or tree would miss our cars.

After battling a fire at our uncle Aram’s house, Talin let us know she’d come back to the area. Zabel had hung back with her Nana, Angelina, but Talin, Koe, and Lilit were at Target, trying to rebuild their kids’ wardrobes. When we found them there, we hugged them and wept together.

When we went to see Zabel, she showed us a little book she’d made about her experience, entitled “A Scary Day.” She described the fire, the evacuation, and the loss of their home, and illustrated every scene. As we talked to the girls over pizza, they told us which of their classmates had lost their homes too. Koe’s brother Joe and his girlfriend Caitlin cheered up the girls by starting work on a new hutch for the bunnies.

When we left for the evening, we drove straight back to the Espinozas’ home, and we took pictures and videos of the rubble for Talin and Koe. The old stone walls were unsteady, but they were still standing. Miraculously, the guest room and garage had survived. But everything else had been destroyed. No trace of the piano, no trace of the ukeleles, no trace of Zabel’s drawings on the side of the refrigerator. All we could recognize were the blackened laundry machines, the bathtubs, the headboards of the girls’ beds, and a couple of dutch ovens. Half the homes on the block were gone; the other half—no telling how—lived on.

Early Thursday morning, we found a hole in the police line on New York Drive and made it back to the Espinozas’ home. Koe and Jeff followed soon after, and we thanked Jeff for his heroism.

When we arrived, there was a white pick-up truck parked outside of the Espinoza home. None of the neighbors who were there recognized it, and others said they’d seen an unfamiliar man entering people’s backyards. At a moment when none of us were out on the street, someone hurried into the truck and took off. We decided then that we’d have to take everything we could from the guest room and garage. When I told Talin that we may have had a looter on the street, she was overcome by emotion and had to end the call. 

Kristin and Austin soon joined us, and our group spent all morning packing the most important surviving items into our cars. 

I spent time looking at each book on the guest room shelves, thinking about whether they were likely to have sentimental value to my sister. Book by book, journal by journal, item by item, I was reminded that Talin approaches every object she encounters with the eye of a curator. She has a unique ability to see an object’s beauty or significance before anyone else does, and she finds a way to preserve the items that everyone subconsciously loves. 

Her home was a museum of such objects: the Astourian family’s upright piano; the backgammon board made by our great-grandfather and passed down to us by our grandfather Bedros; the framed copy of Bible verses and personal wisdom in Bedros’ handwriting; our grandmother Nver’s gold ring; our grandmother Arpi’s dining table, at which the entire Deukmejian clan had spent countless Thanksgivings and Christmases. The backgammon board was there in the guestroom, and the gold ring had made it out with Talin. But the handwritten pages, the piano, and the dining table were gone. And they weren’t sitting in a dump somewhere. They hadn’t been dismantled for parts. They’d just disappeared. They were just like the rest of the ash in Altadena: buried in the ground or floating around, poisoning LA’s air.

After the work was done, we stood in front of the house, reflecting on everything we’d just experienced. As Koe walked us through the irreplaceable objects we’d lost to the flames, his eyes filled up with tears. We talked about the way the Espinozas had opened their home to our extended family and had made it a new hub for family gatherings. We talked about the party we’d had there just days earlier and about Emi’s and Lilit’s glittery performance of Dua Lipa’s “Dance The Night.” 

Talin had woven so many meaningful objects into her home. But she’d done more than that. She’d invited us here, the place she referred to as the Espinozas’ “forever home,” and she’d made it a part of our lives. We’d come there to eat and catch up; to talk and to laugh; to celebrate and to strengthen our bonds. And slowly, this place had become an embodiment of our love for each other and our unity as a family.

As we stood there grieving, I remembered a poem Talin had framed for her daughters upstairs, a poem by Mattie Stepanik. I’d read it there many times. It said, “Our eyes are for looking at things. But also for crying, when we are very happy or very sad . . . Our hands are for feeling. But also for hugging and touching so gently . . . Our mouths and tongues are for tasting. But also for saying words, like, “I love you,” and, “Thank you, God, for all of these things.”

That’s what we’ve been doing since Tuesday evening. Crying and hugging and saying, “I love you.” But this is my “thank you” to God. Thank you for this home. Thank you for all the meaningful pieces of paper and plastic and stone. And thank you for the Espinozas, who shared them with us.

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In the wake of this devastating fire, the Espinoza family is left to rebuild not just their home but the life they lovingly created within it. While the memories and bonds remain unbroken, the journey ahead is daunting, and they cannot do it alone. Your support can make a meaningful difference in helping them restore what was lost and create a new sanctuary for their family. If you are moved by their story and wish to contribute, please consider donating to their GoFundMe campaign at GoFundMe.com . Together, we can help the Espinozas rebuild their home and their hope for the future. Thank you for your generosity and kindness.