She escaped fire; now red tape is threat

After Eaton blaze, navigating the recovery remains a struggle for a disabled mother

- By Sonja Sharp

For months, Jessica Newman has jolted awake gasping in the darkness at 5 a.m., just as she did on Jan. 8. Early that morning, as the Santa Anas whipped at 90 mph, sheriff's deputies stormed through her Pasadena neighborhood ordering evacuations with flames at their heels.

Breathless as if the smoke still lingered, on a recent morning she bundled her effervescent 3-year-old daughter, Luna, into her car seat for the two-hour trek from her aunt’s house in Riverside, where they have lived for much of the past year, back to their family's 1909 Craftsman home. It stands steps from the Eaton fire burn scar — untouched but uninhabitable.

“It’s such an illusion,” Newman, 32, said of the home where she, her mother and her aunts all grew up. “The house looks so nice. You would never think there’s so much damage.”

At first blush, Newman seems equally vital. But her heart is dying, the result of a rare and often fatal complication of pregnancy that disproportionately affects Black women.

After her diagnosis in 2022, her late grandmother's home became a refuge. The address [See Survivor, A8]

enabled Luna’s hard-won spot in a subsidized preschool program, the family’s public benefits, access to Newman's medical specialists and the elusive form of state health insurance — “straight Medi-Cal” — she needs for a transplant.

A year ago, after months of tests and procedures, she was poised to list for a new heart. Then came the fires.

Officials have long known that disabled residents are disproportionately likely to die in wildfires. It’s a pattern that has been repeated from Paradise, Calif., to Lahaina, Hawaii, and again in Los Angeles County, where Newman’s neighbors the Mitchells burned to death awaiting help that never came.