Was discrimination a factor in the lack of response to the Eaton fire? A human rights lawyer is investigating the case
The prominent human rights lawyer who represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin announced that he is gathering evidence for a possible discrimination case against Los Angeles County regarding its response to the Eaton fire.
Attorney Ben Crump has joined a growing number of officials and community leaders who are concerned that the county’s response to black neighborhoods in Altadena during the Eaton fire was lacking compared to that of white communities threatened by the fire.
The announcement comes a few weeks after California’s attorney general opened a human rights investigation into the state’s fire preparations and responses, focusing on potential differences in the history of Black west Altadena. That part of the city received evacuation warnings hours after the flames threatened the area, and after a long time there were rich, white areas of the unincorporated city.
Crump said he suspects the investigation will find racism at the heart of the flawed response to the fire, which devastated west Altadena. He did not specify when he plans to file a lawsuit.
“We’re fighting that Altadena doesn’t become California’s Katrina, where you have all those Black residents and their wealth that they were passing on to their children who just got lost and couldn’t come back,” Crump said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Crump is known for representing relatives of victims of high-profile cases of police brutality. He is also involved in some of the largest non-police cases going on in the county, including representing victims of sexual assault in the county. children’s halls and about 600 victims of the Eaton fire.
Crump said Thursday that he was working with Carl Douglas, a civil rights attorney known for representing OJ Simpson during his 1995 murder trial, to investigate the case against the county.
“If the facts show there was no discrimination, then so be it,” Douglas said. “But if the facts show that decisions are made based on the racial makeup of the community, we will demand accountability.”
Altadena residents La Toya Andrews, left, and Nancy Ferdinand gather at a donation center set up at First AME Zion Church in Pasadena to help residents affected by the January 2025 Eaton fire.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
An LA County spokesperson said in a statement that no other review of the fire response found “any discrimination or structural bias in the County’s response.”
“We believe that any new investigation will find that emergency responders did their best under unprecedented and devastating fire conditions with hurricane-force winds and the inability to conduct search flights, as they struggled to save lives, homes, and businesses,” the statement said. “We will never forget the lives that were tragically lost.”
The district is already facing a lawsuit related to its response from Southern California Edison, which says the district’s mistakes contributed significantly to wildfire deaths.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta opened a human rights investigation last month in the county’s response to the Eaton fire in Altadena, we looked at disparate outcomes based on race, age and disability. Bonta said that he believes that this is the first human rights investigation by the government regarding the investigation of the fire.
A Times investigative series found that west Altadena experienced delayed evacuations and limited firefighting resources as the fire spread, especially compared to the east side of town, which is closer to where the fire started. The western part of Altadena received evacuation warnings hours after the eastern part.
All but one of the 19 deaths in the Eaton fire occurred west of Lake Avenue, the city’s unofficial east-west boundary.
On Thursday, attorneys spoke about a new report from LAist that details the report’s concerns about who was in charge of the emergency operations center, or EOC, the night of the fire. The whistleblower alleged that the employee in charge of the EOC at the time of the Eaton fire was “sleeping in his office” during the first – and most critical – hours of the fire, and appeared to not understand the gravity of the situation when his job ended on the morning of Jan. 8, 2025. Thousands of homes were destroyed in the fire.
“How do you sleep on one side of society?” Zaire Calvin, who he lost his sister west of Altadena, asked at a news conference Thursday.
The worker denied that he fell asleep on the job that night, according to LAist, and officials from the Office of Emergency Management said they saw the worker awake doing his job the night of the fire.
However, district officials pointed out that the employee was “not responsible for receiving or issuing evacuation notices and warnings.”
“Taking these allegations and suggesting that this led to the tragic death of 19 Altadena residents is false and appears to be intended to heighten the concerns of reckless residents,” a county spokesperson said in a statement.
Reporting from the Times found that responsibility for ordering the warnings was placed primarily on the shoulders of LA County Fire Department officials, who worked with the Office of Emergency Management and the Sheriff’s Department to issue the warnings. But none of those agencies or their top officials have commented on the delayed warnings west of Altadena — or explained in detail what went wrong.
The evacuation order was issued west of Altadena shortly before 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 8, hours after residents called 911 to report smoke and flames threatening the area. East Altadena was evacuated more than seven hours earlier, around 7:30 pm on Jan. 7.
Many residents told The Times harrowing stories of narrowly escaping smoke-filled homes and rain-soaked streets. Some families blamed the lack of warnings for the deaths of their relatives.
Nick Vaquero, the nurse who first spoke to LAist, confirmed to The Times many details about his complaint, which he sent to county officials in October. But he said he was disappointed in how the district responded to his concerns about what he described as OEM mismanagement, poor leadership and other deficiencies, including deficiencies uncovered by an independent consultant who reviewed the district’s emergency plan.
“I’m still trying to get the district to do the right thing,” said Vaquero, 39. “This is about accountability and trying to fix this broken system.”
He said the district has taken the right steps, including hiring more people and adding positions to an understaffed department, but it’s not enough.
The county has yet to provide clear answers about why west Altadena didn’t receive immediate evacuation warnings, or see fewer firefighters, during the Eaton fire, according to victims’ relatives.
