By Sarah Kaplan · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Timothy George Hanley, 88, needs regular dialysis treatments. Patricia Diann McKenna, 77, has a disfigured leg that makes it difficult for her to move.
Theresa Warrior, 84, last contacted her family in October. Kevin Devine, 54, was seen packing up his car, presumably to evacuate, as the Eaton Fire swept into his Altadena, California, neighborhood on Jan. 7.
Each of them lived in the areas devastated by the Palisades and Eaton fires this month, according to advisories from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. None of them have been seen since.
They are among an estimated 22 people who remain unaccounted for two weeks after the city was first engulfed in flames, the sheriff’s department said Monday. The number of missing almost rivals the 27 deaths reported by the county medical examiner, though it is not clear how much the cases overlap.
In at least 11 cases, human remains have been uncovered in the wreckage of burned buildings where the missing people were believed to have been when the fires began. Officials are waiting for the medical examiner to identify the remains before those deaths can be confirmed.
But in several other cases, the sheriff’s department said, both human searchers and trained cadaver dogs had scoured the homes of missing people and failed to uncover a trace of them. Their fates remain a mystery, and their families are left in limbo.
Advisories issued by the sheriff’s department provide a sobering portrait of the people who remain lost. Almost all of the missing are elderly or suffer from mobility problems, and they probably would have struggled to evacuate from the fast-moving blazes.
Fires are among the most difficult mass casualty events for victim identification, said Kim Gin, a former Sacramento County coroner who helped with the response to the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and the 2023 fire in Maui, two of the deadliest blazes in U.S. history. People’s remains are often too badly damaged for authorities to obtain fingerprints, leaving them dependent on slower identification methods.
New rapid DNA analysis tools have sped up the process of genetic testing, but investigators must have samples from relatives for comparison, Gin said. If a victim had no immediate family, or relatives live too far away to send samples, this option might not be available.
After the Camp Fire, Gin was able to identify victims using the serial numbers on knee replacements, orthopedic implants, and other medical hardware – a painstaking process that required her to navigate a maze of medical paperwork.
“You would think in this day and age we would be able to find these things quickly, but we can’t,” Gin said. “I feel the worst for the families, because I know what they’re going through.”
It remains possible that some of L.A.’s missing are alive but unable to get in touch with family members, officials said. Of the 47 missing person reports filed since the fires began, 25 people have been found safe, including nine since Thursday.
Reserve Deputy Sheriff Dan Paige, who has helped lead search-and-rescue efforts in Altadena, said he knew of an elderly couple who didn’t use cellphones and kept track of phone numbers in a physical address book. When the book was lost to the fire that consumed their house, the couple had no way to contact their relatives – they could only wait for someone to track them down.
“I’m hoping that’s the case for many of these missing people,” Paige said.
But after two weeks of searching the charred ruins of Altadena, he knows all too well how hard it has been to identify bodies – and how likely it is that some victims remain in the wreckage, waiting to be found.
“We have satellite images to know where a house was and a house should be … but everything has been obliterated,” he said.
Every day, at least 100 workers fan out across the burned neighborhood, scouring the smoking rubble of residential streets, busy thoroughfares and winding trails where people without homes were known to camp. When they find something that looks like human remains, they pass it off to a team of trained anthropologists and the county medical examiner’s office.
The scale of destruction makes the identification process more difficult, Paige said. Broken bits of drywall can look just like fragments of bone. In at least once case, search crews thought they’d uncovered a human victim, only for the medical examiner to conclude the remains belonged to an animal.
The search itself can be treacherous, Paige said. Burned buildings are unstable and full of toxic material. Damaged propane tanks can be heard hissing all around the neighborhood. One member of Paige’s crew had to see a doctor after a nail went through their thick-soled work boot.
“But the group just keeps moving forward,” Paige said. “We’re just checking every place we possibly could.”
For many families, closure will come in the form of heartbreak.
Miva Wheatley Friedli’s relatives held out hope that she had managed to flee before the Eaton Fire consumed her house in Altadena. Members of the large, close-knit family fanned out across the city, going shelter to shelter, bed to bed, in search of their elderly matriarch.
But on Jan. 14, seven days after the fire’s arrival, human remains were discovered near what was once her home’s front door, according to a GoFundMe page set up on behalf of the family. They are presumed to belong to Friedli.
As he scours the charred remnants of Altadena, Paige is haunted by memories of the Eaton Fire’s chaotic first hours. The blaze advanced so quickly that his search-and-rescue crew had to abandon its usual practice of setting up road blocks and directing traffic. Instead, crew members drove into the neighborhood and focused on evacuating as many residents as they could.
And when he finds remains, Paige can’t help but wonder if the victim was someone he saw that night – one of the people still packing their cars, or someone who’d gotten lost on the smoke-clogged streets and accidentally drove toward the fire.
“That has affected a lot of us,” Paige said. “Because we couldn’t save everyone.”
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Razzan Nakhlawi and Alice Crites contributed to this report.