A Neighborhood Burned, a Home Saved, a Future in Question

Firefighters, heroic tenants and a change of winds spared a home on Quadro Vecchio Drive in Los Angeles during the January wildfires. What comes next for the home—and the families who love it—is complicated.

LOS ANGELES — Gaylen Grody and her son, Shelby, pulled into 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive as flames leaped across the other side of Los Leones Canyon in Pacific Palisades and, blown by the winds, seemed to be heading straight for them. 

Winter Reign and her daughter, two of the Grody’s tenants, were in the driveway, stuffing what they could into an SUV. It was Jan. 7, and the first evacuation warnings had been issued just after 11 a.m. 

Grody had grown up in the house, a classic bungalow built as a wedding gift for an artist and his wife in 1949 that offered nearly 360-degree views of the surrounding hills, verdant chaparrals, and the Pacific Ocean; Reign, her ex-partner, Brendan Armm, and their two children loved the home like it was their own. 

---

As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund more than 170 reporting projects every year on critical global and local issues. Donate any amount today to become a Pulitzer Center Champion and receive exclusive benefits!

---

When they got inside, Reign told Grody, “If there’s anything you need to do, if you want to walk through the house, if you want to have a moment in the house or outside, absolutely take that moment.” 

Grody is still deeply moved by that kindness and their shared connection to the house. She knew Reign and Armm, both 49, were the perfect renters, but she had no idea Armm was willing to risk his life trying to save the home. Now, in the fire’s aftermath, the families are forging a new bond, one built around their shared experience of displacement.

As Grody, 63, and Shelby Grody, 28, arrived that morning, they were arguing. Shelby, who had just arrived at LAX from Seattle, had qualms about showing up unannounced. “‘Wait, you can’t go in. You didn’t give them 24 hours’ notice,’” his mother remembers him saying. She laughs at the absurdity of the moment in hindsight. “So I looked at him, and I go, ‘In 24 hours there will not be a house.’”

She remembers the words “I’m gonna lose the house, I’m gonna lose the house” playing on a loop in her head as she stepped inside. She took a moment to marvel at the view one last time as the fire reached the back fence and threatened her beloved coral tree. 

“It’ll be an act of God for me not to lose this house,” she thought. “And there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I can’t do anything. I can’t fight this fight.” 

She adds now: “Little did I know what would happen that night.”

She drove off, knowing at least that her husband, Wayne Grody, an M.D., Ph.D. geneticist at UCLA, was alive back in the Highlands section of the Palisades, where the Grody family lived on Avenida de Cortez, though he would soon undergo his own trial by fire. Shelby Grody had finally reached his “luddite,” cell-phone-phobic father by calling him over and over.

Reign and her teenage daughter, River, continued packing the SUV. Another recent fire on Jan. 1 had quickly been brought under control, and, at first, Reign believed this one would be similarly contained. “We didn’t think that it would jump to this side, but the winds that day were just so crazy. It was like something out of a movie,” she said.

She had checked on friends in the neighborhood group and kept an eye out the back window on the billowing plume of smoke rising above the highlands across the canyon. Before the Grodys had turned up in the driveway, she and her daughter saw the fire was getting bigger.

“And I said, ‘OK, River, it’s time. Let’s just hurry. Pack up the cats,’” she recalled. “We have been evacuated so many times. We have a protocol for what to do. I get photos, I get hard drives. I tape up old windows to stop any smoke from coming through. It’s normally really quick.” 

This time was different. 

She spent the next hour working to gather belongings for Armm and their son, Leaf, certain they were leaving 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive for the last time. She and Armm had separated several years ago, but remained close friends and were committed to co-parenting River and Leaf. Though Reign no longer lived in the house, she had spent the night to help with the kids in the morning because Armm had to leave early for work.

Soon after the Grodys left, Reign and her daughter followed

“It was like end of days, the wind was blowing and ash was everywhere. I’d loaded everything up. Our neighbors were all leaving, and as I went to close the door, I could see the fire over on the ridge,” Reign said. “And so I just closed the door, and I was just like, ‘All right. Well, that’s it.” We left. And then at 12:33 p.m. we were on the road down the hill.”

“Everything’s Burning”

Four minutes later, Sunshine Armstrong, Brendan Armm’s current partner, arrived at 262 Quadro Vecchio and found the back garden window boxes on fire. Born and raised in Malibu, Armstrong had been a member of the fire brigade for years. She had headed straight to Quadro Vecchio after the first alert for the Palisades fire went out. 

Armstrong used a water bottle she was carrying to douse the small flames, but when she attempted to spray down the still-smoldering area with the garden hose, she discovered it was full of holes. She grabbed a large blanket from the house and smothered embers in the yard, but without water there wasn’t much she could do.

She retreated back down the canyon road to regroup near the relative safety of the beach. Around 12:50 p.m., Armstrong caught a ride back up the hill with a pair of good Samaritans with fire response training. As they crested the hill, she saw the house engulfed in smoke, 10-foot flames leaping from the house next door, spraying sparks everywhere. As she watched the side fence ignite from the flying embers, a fire truck pulled in. The fire crew swiftly hacked through the fence and doused the entire area. 

Armstrong was convinced it was too late for 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive. But as she and her fellow volunteers drove back down the hill to get out of the fire crews’ way, she called Armm, an M.D. who specializes in traditional Chinese medicine. 

“Everything’s burning,’” Armm remembers her saying. But she wasn’t giving up. “Come, just come. We can help. I don’t know how you’ll get here, but just come,” she said. 

It was the first Armm had heard that the fire had reached the other side of the canyon. He had canceled his appointments and driven off to pick up his son, Leaf, a student at Paul Revere Charter Middle School who, a caller from the school told Armm, had been relocated to University City High School. 

Armm arrived at the high school shortly before Armstrong called. Seeing no students, he called Reign, asked her to pick up Leaf, who was still at Paul Revere, as it turned out, and headed for 262 Quadro Vecchio, knowing that Reign and their two kids were safe. 

Armm entered the Palisades through a back road but quickly found himself trapped in gridlocked traffic. He parked his Tesla by Palisades Charter High School, borrowed a couple of N95 masks from a passing news crew, and hiked to his house, meeting up with Armstrong along the way.

When they first got to 262 Quadro Vecchio a little after 1 p.m., things at first seemed calm. The fire trucks were gone, and through the haze of smoke Armm saw that his house was still standing.

Armm and Armstrong went through the partially melted gate, left ajar after the firefighters broke it down to put out the embers on the fence. “We went to the backyard, and there were a whole bunch of things on fire. Still. There was a stump on fire,” he said. “I was watering it for the longest time, because every time I stopped watering, the fire would come out. Because it wasn’t just the stump, all the roots were on fire in the earth too.”

Without a working hose, Armm and Armstrong resorted to running around the yard, dousing spot fires with tea kettles and saucepans, sprinting back to the kitchen for more water as they tried to keep pace with the constant barrage of embers from the burning house next door. 

By 2 p.m., the couple had the spot fires under control, and the house next door had mostly burnt itself out. They decided to use the momentary calm to water down the front of the house. The front hose was intact, but was too short to stretch around the house. But it was long enough to spray down the front façade of 262 and the neighboring house.

Armm then climbed to the roof, intending to spray it down as well, but from his perch he noticed spot fires popping up in the yard across the way. Armm and Armstrong spent the next several hours stomping out embers and beating back spot fires, trying to protect not just their home, but all of the dozen homes left standing on Quadro Vecchio, and working to keep the fire from spreading to any houses on Bellino Drive, the next street over. 

"All the roots were on fire in the earth too."

Brendan Armm

But after the first few hours of their vigil, the fire jumped the street, spread to two more homes and threatened the front of 262—it was too big for them to handle alone. 

Armstrong rushed to the fire trucks standing guard to protect the famous Getty Villa museum nearby and asked for help.

A firefighter said he’d see what he could do, she remembered. Soon, a fire crew came and “just pounded the two burning homes with the gun hose on top of the truck,” she said.

The fire had spread to yet another house while Armstrong was off getting help, and although the fire department couldn’t save it, firefighters were able to stop the spread, limiting the damage on Quadro Vecchio.

Around 6 or 7 p.m., Armm got a text from Reign. That evening Reign had seen a desperate plea from a woman who lived a few streets over in one of the group chats she was monitoring, asking anyone still in the Palisades to rescue her dog. 

The woman had rushed to pick up her daughter from school just minutes away and left her puppy in a playpen at home, intending to return immediately. But she ended up trapped on the other side of the barricades, unable to get back. 

Armm and Armstrong made their way over; though the home itself was still intact, it was surrounded by burning houses.

The terrified puppy was small enough to easily carry. Back at 262 Quadro Vecchio, the couple settled the pup with his bed and some food and water in a well-sealed bathroom. It was spared the worst of the smoke and ash and its location near the center of the house muffled the booms of gas tanks exploding around the neighborhood. 

That settled, they launched back to work, a two-person fire crew determined to save as much of the neighborhood as possible. Across the street, firefighters were wrapping up their work on Quadro Vecchio. Before going, the truck crew gave Armm and Armstrong the option of getting a ride out, but the couple felt safe enough to stay and keep working.

There was another fire crew stationed just around the corner from the bottom of Quadro Vecchio Drive, so he and Armstrong kept up their frantic work, fighting spot fire after spot fire.

Around 10 p.m., the winds had picked up significantly, but they had also shifted direction. Now in the dark, Armm saw fewer flames sprinkled across the mountainside, and they seemed to be spreading away from the house.

“That was when I went over and talked to that last fire truck,” Armstrong recalled. When a firefighter told her they planned to stay in the neighborhood but could be called away at any moment, effectively stranding the couple, she and Armm decided to retreat. 

Armm packed a final bag. With the puppy in tow, the couple left. A rescue vehicle full of supplies a few streets over drove them to the Regent Hotel in Santa Monica, where they were met by the dog’s grateful owner.

The Grodys Escape

As she had driven away that day, Gaylen Grody knew she’d probably never again see the home where she grew up and her mother had died. Yet she also felt her mother’s presence was standing watch. She was oddly serene, despite the chaos. Trapped in gridlocked traffic, she had a striking thought: She wouldn’t lose the house. 

But the mood quickly passed. Staring down from her perch on the canyon road at the unmoving southbound lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, she began to panic. She knew if she and her son got trapped in that traffic jam, they would likely have to abandon the car. 

As people fleeing the fires on foot streamed past them toward the Vons supermarket and the parking lot at the beach, she suddenly realized the northbound lanes on PCH were completely open. “No one was going that way. Why? I do not know. Because Malibu hadn’t burned yet, it wasn’t even remotely on anyone’s mind,” Grody said. 

Mother and son drove two hours north, straight to Camarillo, where they holed up in a hotel. 

“I really thought I was going to die. It’s the only time I’d ever thought that. But I was just hoping that I would die of smoke inhalation first, before the burns.” 

Wayne Grody

Wayne Grody, meanwhile, had evacuated the family’s home in the Palisades Highlands section and also driven straight into gridlocked traffic on Sunset Boulevard, close to where it intersected the Pacific Coast Highway.

It was on fire. The palm trees lining the road were “all burning from the top,” he said. “There were burned-out cars on either side. The flames were six, maybe eight, feet away on both sides. I was in the middle of the road. There were firefighters there telling us, ‘You’re OK, you’re in a safe spot.’ But, you know, I could feel the heat.” 

He sat there, with his dog, Rothko, for over two hours. 

“I really thought I was going to die. It’s the only time I’d ever thought that. But I was just hoping that I would die of smoke inhalation first, before the burns.” 

Firefighters finally told all the stranded motorists to go back home and shelter in place while they cleared the abandoned vehicles clogging the road.

He ended up that night at a friend and UCLA colleague’s house in Santa Monica. “When I got there, I was all alone with the dog. I was never so grateful for Santa Monica—I literally kissed the ground.” Wayne laughed. “I was spared from death.”

“We Just Had to Get Back There”

Armm and Armstrong, exhausted from dousing flames and smothering embers for hours on Quadro Vecchio Drive, spent the following day, Jan. 8, visiting their kids. They went that morning to see Armstrong’s daughter, Victoria, who was home with her grandparents in Malibu. In the afternoon, it was on to see River and Leaf, who were with Reign at a friend’s house. 

That night, Armm and Armstrong saw on television that the burn zone had expanded to include 262 Quadro Vecchio, as well as the rest of the houses along the canyon rim on their street.

 “I just couldn’t even consider that the home was on fire, that it could have gone up since we’d been there. I couldn’t contemplate that,” said Armm. 

But that night he dreamed it was gone, a four-foot-deep hole where the house had been. He woke up shaking.

The next morning, Armm woke with the feeling that, “we just had to get back there. So we got two bikes and Winter drove us through those little barricades, and got us as close as she could,” he said. 

The house was still standing.

Armm and Armstrong spent the rest of the day taking requests from friends and neighbors to check on their houses, sending back photos and status updates.

They made one other stop while they were in the burn zone: Before they had children, Armm and Reign bought a small home in Malibu Village, where they lived for many years until their family outgrew the two-bedroom home and moved to 262 Quadro Vecchio. But they kept the property, and Reign moved back to the home when the couple separated. She had just moved the last of her things back to Malibu Village about six months before the fire. 

The home was gone. Just two of the 31 homes in Malibu Village had survived. The couple stayed in Malibu Village for a little while, taking the time to find the few mementos that had survived the fire, as both of them were concerned about what it would mean for Reign.

She was devastated. “Our kids were born in the house that burned down,” Reign said later. 

“Not Today … Not My House” 

The Grodys finally reunited in Santa Monica on Jan. 11 and relocated the next day to a hotel in Brentwood. But before they could even unpack, a new evacuation order came through as fires raged, now threatening Santa Monica and Brentwood. Thoroughly traumatized, the Grodys decided to move to a hotel well away from any fires. 

That afternoon they drove to a Residence Inn 16 miles south on the 405 in Lawndale. They were worried about their home in the Highlands burning down, and they had no idea that Armm and his partner had gone back and saved 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive. 

That news came a few days later when Armm sent them a video of the neighborhood, with the house still standing.

On Jan. 23, Armm picked up Gaylen Grody on the Pacific Coast Highway and they drove to the house together. It was the first time she’d been back.

Armm described a moment when the flames had nearly overwhelmed him, but suddenly, a powerful gust of wind came from the opposite direction, and blew the flames down the hill and away from the house. 

“That was my mom,” Grody replied. “My mom was out there screaming her head off: ‘Not today, not at my house, not my house.’”

Ruth Ducker, Grody’s mother, had first toured the house in 1964 and instantly fell in love. “​​The minute she walked in, she said to my dad, ‘I can grow old here. I can die here.’ And that’s exactly what happened,” Grody said. Ducker died in her own home nearly a decade ago of advanced Alzheimer’s. And then Gaylen and Wayne found the perfect tenants, Brendan Armm and Reign, who also loved the house and wanted to raise their kids in nature.

To the north and east were rolling hills, speckled with California poppies between dense chaparrals, criss-crossed by miles of trails, the closest of which began just minutes from 262. To the south and west lay the lights of Santa Monica and the glittering Pacific Ocean. This was the view that Ducker had fallen in love with more than 60 years ago. 

When Armm heard Grody talk about her mother’s presence on the night of the fire, she remembered his response: “ ‘I actually think you’re right. I actually do. I believe you. Because I had this sense, not this house, this house has to be saved.’” 

The bank called a few weeks after the fires were finally contained on Jan. 31, letting Grody know she could come check her parents’ safe deposit box. As she was escorted back to the burned remains of the vault, she saw most of the boxes were either rusting from water damage or half-melted from the heat of the fire. But then she saw her box. 

“It was absolutely perfect. It looked perfectly fine. There was not even a singe mark,” she said. At first she was mystified. Then she thought, “My mother came to the bank! She saved the box.”

Inside, Grody found the original 1949 plans for 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive. Mixed in among the blueprints and property survey, she also discovered her father’s antique coin collection. “My father was born in 1919, so that’s really one of the few things I have from him,” she said.

But the reality of what had been saved and lost was setting in. Grody dreaded her frequent trips back to 262 Quadro Vecchio, with its burned yard, windows blown out by intense heat and partially melted siding. Finally, about a month after her first visit with Armm, she burst into tears. 

“It hit me: This was it, it was never coming back,” she said. “My childhood was gone. My whole childhood, every touchstone,” from the bank to the post office. “I can’t go back.”

And she can’t yet return to her own home, where her family had been living before the fire. The two-story white stucco house, circa 1973, sustained smoke and soot damage and some nickel contamination, all of which needs to be addressed before the Grodys can move back. 

“Now, when I go to my mother’s house, the yard is completely burned. All my father’s fruit trees that I remember him planting when I was a kid, and the fruit we grew and ate, it’s all gone. And my mother’s favorite coral tree,” Gaylen mummered, going quiet.

Since February, Grody’s days have been filled by calls with her insurance company and trips out to one or both of the family’s houses to meet with insurance adjusters, industrial hygienists conducting environmental testing and contractors from remediation companies as she fields bids and puts together an estimate of just how much time and money it will take to get the homes fully remediated. 

The Grodys have regular homeowners’ insurance on their house on Avenida de Cortez and have been reimbursed for asbestos and arsenic testing. But 262 Quadro Vecchio is another story. 

There, the family has only a landlord’s insurance policy, which she discovered is geared more toward protecting the landlord from any damage the tenant does to the property than from natural disasters. So far, the insurer has not reimbursed the Grodys even for environmental testing there. 

Grody fears the insurance won’t cover even a fraction of the remediation. “We need to have them come in, clean the entire house and replace the insulation. Because that house has arsenic, asbestos, nickel, lead and antimony. That house is a disaster because the homes next door all burned.” 

She’s received two estimates and forwarded them to the insurance company. She’s also got an asbestos abatement estimate of $50,000, and she’s struggling to secure an abatement company. “I can’t just leave the house like that—even if no one moved into it for 100 years, asbestos doesn’t go anywhere,” she said. “No, I can’t leave it. I have to clean it. So I lose sleep over this. I want to make the house safe.” 

Windows, siding, drywall and plaster all need to be replaced, and the yard where she spent so much time as a child has what she describes as a Hiroshima quality to it—bombed out. 

“It’s going to be hard. I’m assuming I’m only going to get about half the money that it will cost me to actually fix it,” said Grody. “But before any of that cleaning can happen the house has to be completely emptied. So Brendan and Winter are doing that right now.”

“A New Beginning” 

Armm and Reign went back to 262 Quadro Vecchio at least once a week in February and March. One Sunday afternoon in April, they brought River and Leaf for the first time so they could clean out their rooms. 

By this point, Armm and Reign had grown accustomed to donning personal protective equipment from the supplies stored neatly in the SUV’s trunk, and taking precautions not to touch their faces once inside. There was momentary confusion as River and Leaf attempted to put on Tyvek suits, boot covers and respirators for the first time. 

Once in her old room, River struggled with the reminders of her former life. Her school had still been on winter break when the fires broke out. The last day River set foot in Pali High, heavily damaged by the fire and still closed, was Dec. 19. River only packed two sets of clothes and took a couple favorite photos the day of the fire. They had been evacuated countless times in the last seven years, with nothing ever coming of it, so she saw no reason why this time should be any different.

“My school burned down,” River said later. “And at first it was like, ‘Oh, we’re probably gonna go somewhere else really soon.’ But we’re still on Zoom.”

“Sometimes I wish the house had just burned down.”

River

A talented dancer, studying modern, ballet, jazz and hip hop, River resumed her classes once her studio relocated to a new space in March. That at least finally gave her a small piece of her routine back, though she was still struggling to navigate the social isolation of only getting to see her peers over Zoom as a 14-year-old girl.

River has also been forced to watch as many of her lifelong friends have moved away in the wake of the fires. “Most are moving… pretty far. So lots of them I’m never going to see again,” said River. “I have some friends that are moving to Tennessee, to live with their grandparents. So it’s definitely a change.” 

As the family cleared out of the house and began systematically stripping off layers of PPE, talk swiftly turned to dinner and where to find the best loaded fries now that their favorite restaurant had burned down. Armm and Reign strategized over their dining options while River and Leaf contemplated the lives they left behind, in their rooms at 262. 

“I hate having to go through every single thing and throw things out that I wouldn’t want to throw out, you know? There’s lots of things that I’d be fine with just disappearing, but I hate having to make the choice,” River said to her brother. 

Leaf nodded. “Yeah, and it really sucks that we can’t even donate the stuff, because it’s not safe,” he said. 

Looking down, River muttered, “Sometimes I wish the house had just burned down.” 

At that, Leaf, whose in-person classes had resumed at his old middle school, said, “I don’t know. It’s also an opportunity to, like, redo something. It’s like a new beginning, you know?” 

Summer 

As of early June, neither family was back in their home.

Gaylen and Wayne Grody, with their dog Rothko, were still in the Residence Inn in Lawndale where they’d fled as the fires burned back in January. Shelby Grody moved into an apartment in February, shortly after beginning his job as a clinical research coordinator at UCLA. 

Brendan Armm and Winter Reign and their kids River and Leaf moved into a rented house in Brentwood, realizing it would be a long time before they could return to the Palisades. Armm’s partner, Sunshine Armstrong, has a home in Malibu that survived the fires.

“Right now, we are all staying together in Brentwood,” Reign said. “It’s Brendan, the kids, the cats, me and then Sunshine is often there as well. So, we’re a big modern family! As long as there’s love and respect, that’s all that matters.”

Armm and Armstrong’s heroics at 262 Quadro Vecchio Drive on Jan. 7 cemented their bond with the Grodys, two families brought even closer by their shared love of the house.

The current plan is for the Grodys to rent the home, well below market rate, to Armm and his family once it’s fully remediated and renovated, which will require removing all the asbestos and heavy metals, and possibly taking the house down to its studs. But the Grodys also don’t want the Armm family to feel pressured to move back in, in case they decide it isn’t safe.

Gaylen Grody still wants to leave the home to her son Shelby, but if she and her husband ever do decide to sell, it will be to Armm and his family. “After everything he’s done, we should just give him the house!” Wayne Grody said of Brendan Armm. 

This is not now, and never had been, a typical landlord-tenant relationship. 

“I mean, we understand that this place means so much to Gaylen,” said Winter Reign. “The coral tree outside, where the parrots used to congregate, that tree has a face carved in it from when she was a kid, and one of the steps out back has her handprint in it from when they were first built. This is the house that she grew up in. We are all connected to this house. We just love it so much.” 

In the end, Reign was the only one who lost her home, the small two-bedroom in Malibu Village where her children were born. 

“I always say, the most important thing is that we made it out. Everything else we’ll figure out,” Reign said. “And it’s one of those things. I lost my house, but I made it out. I lost all my things. I sifted through the debris, just to say goodbye to whatever little piece I could find. And that’s it. You just start again.”

After the fires, Gaylen Grody called an arborist out to 262 Quadro Vecchio to look at the coral tree, her mother’s favorite. He told her it was too severely burned and would have to be cut down. 

But weeks later, when his crew arrived to clear the yard, the coral was blooming and had full green foliage. Part of the upper branches were black, but not all. “The arborist said he thinks he can save the tree for me,” Grody said. “He trimmed it and cleaned it up.” 

And of course she knows what happened. It was her mom. She was there that night, and wouldn’t let the tree die.