As the Eaton fire ripped through Altadena, Begonya De Salvo was trying to figure out where her husband, two children and five pets would find shelter. Fearing her home could be reduced to ashes, she said work was the last thing on her mind.
While trying to find a hotel room, De Salvo forgot to call in sick from her job as a court interpreter. Despite telling her supervisor she was under an evacuation order, she was threatened with discipline by court officials, according to an e-mail reviewed by The Times.
The next morning, LA County courts tried to conduct business as usual, even as devastating fires burned from the Pacific Palisades to the San Gabriel Mountains.
Attorneys at the Pasadena courthouse, which remained open near the Altadena inferno, fell ill and were forced to quit, according to the president of the union that represents high-ranking prosecutors. Downtown, jurors panicked over the lack of evacuation notices when they couldn’t check their phones in court. Some defendants who lost their homes or were forced to flee the inferno faced the threat of arrest for missing court, lawyers said.
The decision to keep the courts open last week, even as the smoke cleared, has been met with a mixture of disappointment and surprise by the legal community.
Ryan Erlich, president of the Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys, recalled how during the Dodgers’ World Series celebration last year, proceedings were canceled in LA’s main criminal court, sometimes referred to as the CCB.
“We closed the CCB for a parade and left the Pasadena courthouse open in the middle of a cataclysmic natural disaster?” Erlich said. “I don’t understand that, and neither do many of the people who work in this court.”
Rob Oftring, a spokesman for the LA County Superior Court, said the courts have a “constitutional duty to ensure timely access to justice” and noted that court employees are designated as disaster service workers under state law.
The closure for the Dodgers parade on Nov. 1 was necessary due to road closures in the area, according to Oftring, who noted that all other courts remained open that day. Since the fires began, he wrote in an email, “Court leadership has been actively monitoring the evolving situation, adjusting court operations in coordination with local and state emergency officials.”
The court has also “distributed N95 masks to all staff and jurors and temporarily closed the affected courts,” he said.
The juvenile court in Sylmar was closed for two days because of the Kenneth fire, and the Hollywood court was closed during the brief period in which the Sunset fire was threatening to burn the Walk of Fame. The Pasadena courthouse closed Jan. 9, but not the day before, when the most immediate impacts of the Eaton fire were felt. Hollywood Court was the only one subject to an evacuation order at any point as of last week, Oftring said.
The morning after the Eaton fire, Erlich said, the interior of the Pasadena courthouse smelled like a “firebox” and was unsafe to work in.
“It’s immediately downwind and two miles from the fire and the evacuation zone. It created an immediate environmental concern,” he said. “We’ve had deputies come into court with headaches, eye irritation and other symptoms of being in an unhealthy environment.”
Erlich said some prosecutors and defense attorneys left early because they got sick. About 1 in 10 prosecutors in his union live in a fire evacuation zone, he estimated, and several homes were lost in the fire. At least a dozen judges were unavailable because their homes burned, and several public defenders said they had to be evacuated.
Even incarcerated defendants felt the effects, as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it was unable to transport more than half a dozen people from the county’s Castaic Jail Complex to Newhall and Antelope Valley courthouses on Jan. 8 for due to road closures.
At the downtown LA courthouse, a pungent smell of smoke hung in the courtrooms throughout the sprawling 19-story structure. LA County Public Defender Nicole Joens said some of her clients find themselves caught between the legal system and the flames.
Joens pointed to several examples of clients who either forgot their court dates or simply failed to make it downtown shortly after the fires, leading to warrants for their arrest. Later in the week, she said, judges mercifully lifted the arrest warrants, but some prosecutors still sought to revoke bail.
In one case, Joens said, a prosecutor asked to revoke a defendant’s bail on a probation violation because the defendant was now living in a hotel — a hotel he was forced into because the Eaton fire engulfed his home in Altadena.
“They are in the daily food lines. They have nothing,” said Joens, who was also forced to evacuate for several days because of the Eaton fire. “It seemed like a punishment that this family didn’t have stable housing at this time.”
Joens, who said she was speaking as a member of the public defender’s union, declined to identify any of her clients for fear it could prejudice their criminal cases. The union called for all courts to be closed last week, a move Joens said she disagreed with, but she believes some court officials and prosecutors should have been more flexible given the hell in the hills.
“There should have been more leniency,” she said. “Any objection by the DA against like holding warrants or any of those things was ridiculous, given what we were dealing with.”
Diego Cartagena, head of the legal aid organization Bet Tzedek, said closing courts across the system could have been extremely problematic for clients who needed access to the courts for urgent matters such as custody of a child with urgent medical needs or those seeking domestic violence restraining orders.
“It’s a fundamental issue of access to justice when it comes to the communities we serve,” he said.
Cartagena added that the court could improve remote access to the public so that, in the future, disaster victims could appear remotely over video platforms such as Microsoft Teams or WebEx, which the county used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Jan. 8, Christina Hsu drove from where she lives in the San Gabriel Valley to the downtown criminal courthouse for jury duty. The Eaton Fire was burning several miles north of her residence, and she feared it might advance to her home while she was in court and unable to receive an evacuation warning.
“When there was a wildfire, something should have been done so that we could take care of our survival needs,” Hsu said. “I don’t think it does the court any good if people are worried about evacuating their homes.”
Judge Mildred Escobedo acknowledged the extreme circumstances to Hsu and other potential jurors, saying she had her phone out to monitor evacuation orders and realized some may need to do the same. Once the trial began, she said, jurors would have to leave their phones off while court was in session.
In the late afternoon, Hsu was jury-rigged and went home. As she approached, her phone buzzed with an evacuation warning.
“How can they expect people to focus on the case when we don’t know if we have to evacuate?” she asked.
This is not the time for the court’s handling of a disaster to have attracted great scrutiny. In 2021, Cal/OSHA fined the court $25,000 for multiple health and safety violations after three court interpreters and public defenders died of the virus during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state watchdog found that the courts had not properly reported that an employee had been hospitalized with COVID-19 and had not implemented an effective program to prevent illness and injury and correct unhealthy practices, including a lack of training to prevent COVID-19. translators.
De Salvo, vice president of the translators’ union, said she was shocked to receive an e-mail that her salary would be docked the day after the fires, while trying to figure out how much damage her home had sustained.
“Please note that many other employees who were also affected by the fires managed to call in as requested and we appreciate their diligence during such a difficult time,” read the email from De Salvo’s supervisor.
The CEO’s office granted “special leave” that would have spared employees like De Salvo from losing pay late last week, records show. However, she described the actions of the court’s leadership as “heartless”.
“What did you want me to do? This is a disaster. We were in a state of emergency,” she said. “What kind of person has no compassion at all and would try to punish you for it?”
