As wildfires continue to spread across Los Angeles County, two granddaughters told ABC News Los Angeles they fear their 95-year-old grandmother, Dalyce Curry, may have been killed in the Eaton fire.
Dalyce Kelley and Loree Beamer-Wilkinson said they were still awaiting official confirmation Sunday.
The Eaton Fire has burned more than 14,000 acres in Altadena, California, with 27% containment.
The Southern California fires have killed at least 24 people since they broke out on January 7, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department, who also said that number was expected to rise.
Dalyce Curry stands between her granddaughters in a family photo originally posted to Facebook. Her family fears she lost her life in the Eaton Fire that ravaged Altadena, California, and was awaiting official confirmation on January 12, 2025.
Courtesy of Dalyce Curry’s family
Kelley told KABC she last saw her grandmother last Tuesday, the day the fire broke out.
They had gone to a medical center earlier in the day, and Kelley drove her grandmother home after she got out. On their way home, they saw the fire in the mountains – but it seemed far away, Kelley said.
Once they arrived at Curry’s address, around midnight, Kelley noticed that the power was still on and there was no sense of imminent danger.
Kelley said her grandmother asked her to stay because they were both exhausted from the long day at the hospital.
But Kelley said she has another sibling battling cancer. Someone had been with the brother all day but needed to go home, Kelley said, meaning she had to drive back and replace them.
She is the primary caregiver for that brother and his grandmother, she said, meaning that “if she was still alive, I would have been called by now.”
Kelley checked for her at the Pasadena Civic Center, without success.
The family is hoping for a miracle, “but honestly, we don’t have a lot of hope that she’ll still be here with us,” Kelley said.
The family received a message about the power outage in Altadena around 2 a.m., hours after Curry was brought home.
Altadena has small, eclectic homes, Kelley said, adding that the neighbors all knew each other. She said it looked like someone would get her grandmother out of there, “if I was out and there was an evacuation order that came into play.”
But when she woke up at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, she saw that someone had sent a message to the neighborhood station asking if anyone had had Didi – a nickname for her grandmother.
At that point, Kelley said she “panicked” and called 911. She returned to her grandmother’s address.
As she approached Altadena, “it was so dark, day turned to night,” she said.
There was a barricade, but she jumped out of her vehicle and grabbed a police officer to tell him her elderly grandmother was home alone.
The officer suggested she go to the civic center to see if she had been evacuated there, explaining that he would check the address in the meantime.
-However, Curry was not at the evacuation site. The officer then called Kelley and told her, “I’m sorry your grandmother’s property is gone – it’s burned to the ground,” she recalled in her interview with KABC.
He was asked to file a missing person police report.
A member of the National Guard was able to escort Kelley to her grandmother’s address Friday, she said. When she arrived, “it was total devastation,” she said, adding, “Everything was gone except her blue Cadillac.”
Beamer-Wilkinson, Kelley’s sister who lives in Colorado, tried to help from afar by calling the medical examiner’s office. But she couldn’t get any concrete answers.
They said they hadn’t been to that area yet, but it was on their list and they had his name, Beamer-Wilkinson said.
That was all the two granddaughters had been able to do so far.
“We’re just kind of in a holding pattern right now,” Beamer-Wilkinson added. “It’s very hard to wait and not know anything.”
ABC News has contacted the medical examiner for comment.
The sun is visible through smoke after the Eaton Fire ravaged a neighborhood, while two massive wildfires threatening Los Angeles from the east and west still burned uncontained, in Pasadena, in California, January 9, 2025.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
“Our souls are hurting, our hearts are broken,” Kelley told KABC. “She loved Altadena. No one loved this city more than my grandmother.
“She loved life and, at 95, she was still very active,” Beamer-Wilkinson added. “She was beautiful – she took really good care of herself, she was very proud of who she was and who she represented – and she was an amazing grandmother.”
“She said she was still starting to live, so I knew she would be around beyond 100,” Kelley said. “She still wanted to date, she wanted to find a husband.”
“I felt very privileged to know this woman and to have her as a grandmother,” Beamer-Wilkinson said.
The sisters explained that they saw no reason why Curry would not have contacted them now if she had survived.
“You just wouldn’t think a fire is going to destroy everything,” Beamer-Wilkinson said.
“They need to do better with the emergency system because this is a very elderly community,” Kelley said. “There are a lot of retirees there, and we can’t just rely on cell phones because older people don’t really use cell phones. This is not the case. This is not the only way to inform people when there are evacuation orders.”
“And why didn’t this happen sooner?” she continued. “Why was I allowed to have access to his home at midnight and not receive warnings of danger? No highways sign the path saying, “This is an evacuation zone.”
“When we talk about older people, I think we tend as a society to ignore them and think, ‘Well, they’re living their lives.’ And yes, she was 95 years old, but she had a lot more to give,” Beamer-Wilkinson said. “It’s a shame no one saved her.”
“And I mean, again, maybe we’re speaking out of turn. Maybe she’ll come back, right? We’re drawn to that 1 percent, I hope,” she said, adding that they weren’t sure if they’d see their grandmother again, but: “We just want to know, don’t we ?
