Lahaina survivors search for victims where fires left all vulnerable

LAHAINA, Hawaii — The black smoke from the fire billowed over the ocean as Luz Vargas and her husband, Andres Garcia, left the seaside condo they were cleaning and drove back to Lahaina to find Keyiro.

School had been canceled at Lahainaluna High School due to bad weather, and the 14-year-old boy they considered a son was resting at home, his sophomore year starting the next day. High winds had knocked out the power early that morning, and the modest yellow house on Kaakepa Street was stifling in the late summer heat. Keyiro Fuentes was alone with his terrier, Dexter.

His parents and 20-year-old brother were at work. An older relative who shared the hillside home with its view of palm trees and the ocean below had stepped out that afternoon, unaware anything would go terribly wrong.

At around 4 p.m., as the couple tried to make their way home, traffic snarled in long lines as many in the remote town of 13,000 people fled. Garcia jumped out of their van and grabbed a bicycle to make his way through streets he had known for two decades since moving from Mexico City. Luz simply ran.

It would be two full days until the Garcias could make it home. There, they said, they found Keyiro’s burned body in what remained of his bedroom, his arm around Dexter.

Keyiro is one of at least 111 people who died in the fire that swept through the historic West Maui town of Lahaina, beginning the afternoon of Aug. 8. Officials and residents expect the toll to grow significantly. No American wildfire has claimed more lives in the past century.

The flames were pushed by hurricane-force winds, the escape complicated by Lahaina’s one-road-in-and-out design. The government’s warning system, tested monthly to alert residents of tsunamis, never sounded, and even if it had many here say they would have little idea how to get out of a town nearly surrounded by flames. They had never been told how.

There was no pattern to the deaths, and there was no single path toward safety.

Some found refuge in the ocean; others died in it, suffocating in the heavy smoke or swept to sea along shores already posted with “strong current” warnings.

Some escaped by car, and others were killed in miles-long traffic jams, enveloped by flames at peak heat due to the old wooden construction in the oldest parts of town, including along coastal Front Street where a large portion of the victims are believed to have died.

Some were old, frail and caught at home with no help; others young, like Keyiro, home from school on a bad-weather day. Many children were left with grandparents and great aunts and uncles while parents like the Garcias worked, making escape even more challenging. In many cases, residents say, the very young and the very old died together.

Hi’ialo Palakiko, an elementary school teacher in Lahaina, said a 7-year-old boy whom she saw regularly died with his family. The boy’s uncle passed on the news to her, adding that his nephew had been “so excited for the school year” ahead.

The remains of the dead are scant, making identification nearly impossible in some cases. Of the scores of body bags containing remains, only about 10 victims have been identified by name. It may take months to know the totality of who died and how, although word has spread among surviving residents about many of the names and circumstances.

In the absence of official notice, citizens have taken identification of the dead and missing into their own hands.

“My name is Anthony D. Smith and I live in Thailand,” begins one post on the page of a Facebook group helping to locate the missing. “My father is James P. Smith and is a resident of Lahaina.”

“My step-sister-in-law was rescued and taken to Maui Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately my father was not,” the post continues. “He was last seen unresponsive close to the sea wall. He’s an elderly Afro-American man, tall and slender build.”

One of the few dead officially identified was Buddy Jantoc, a 79-year-old musician who lived at the Hale Mahaolu Eonu complex, a series of single-story apartments for seniors in central Lahaina. The neighborhood was overwhelmed early as the fire raced down the steep hill behind the city toward the sea.

Very little of the central neighborhoods have been searched by recovery crews, who have yet to survey even half the damaged areas, according to estimates by emergency officials. Most police and National Guard posts are designed to keep people out of neighborhoods while search and rescue crews slowly work through them.

A van sits abandoned in the street near where Jantoc lived, its rims melted into puddles of metal pooled on the asphalt. Foundations, all that is left of so many homes, are covered with the charred detritus of lives recently lived — burned-out washing machines, weightlifting sets, televisions.

The dead, though, have proved to be most elusive in a recovery effort that has left many here angry, their numbers already clear evidence of the wind’s ferocity that day and the sheer heat of the fire in an old town by the sea.

“In natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, the bodies are intact once you reach and recover them,” said George Martin, a Maui physician who has been to Lahaina twice since the fire helping with recovery efforts. “Here the fire was so hot it liquefied steel. So what you are really dealing with is teeth, bone and ash when you reach a body. That’s really what’s left of many of the people of Lahaina.”

The Pacific off Lahaina sparkles blue during the day and, when the winds kick up, cottony whitecaps stretch to the horizon. Large pods of spinner dolphin pass the town regularly and, from a pathway along the shoreline, people can watch sea turtles ride currents among the mossy rocks just feet from the coast.

But the ocean is dangerous, as those who live here know. Still, the night of the fire, as the flames rushed toward them, many in the city’s center took to the ocean for refuge anyway, witnesses said.

Coast Guard vessels soon arrived, but their effort to save scores of people stranded in the ocean was hampered by fire in the harbor and the reef in front of town.

Debris was blowing into the sea. Boats in the harbor began exploding, their fuel tanks ignited by windblown embers. All of it blocked the way for those seeking to rescue those near shore.

Kanamu Balinbin, a youth football coach who earlier this week was distributing food and relief supplies in the neighborhood of Kahana, said he was told by a close friend who spent several hours in the water that the Coast Guard had to send dinghies and other small boats to navigate the reef and shallow water, retrieving survivors in small groups.

“They had to row boats in and do it one by one,” he said. “That’s all they had. Dinghies or whatever they had,” he said, recounting what he was told. “It’s the middle of the night. Chaos. Fire going on. Bodies all around.”

“The harbor was on fire.”

The roads were no better.

As Vargas ran through the crowds fleeing Lahaina, she shed her sandals and continued barefoot. People were yelling at her to turn around because she was heading toward the flames, she recalled. She hitched a ride on a moped. She ran across a friend searching desperately for a sister and nephews.

That evening, the sky looked blood red to her, she said, and she choked on the smoke. She cried out to God, again and again, she said. By the time she reached her neighborhood, the house was already in flames, and a policeman told her she could go no farther, she said.

“The policeman put his hand on my shoulder and told me, ‘Have faith, have hope, that your son got out,’” Vargas recalled.

Her husband had taken a different route on the bicycle. The screaming wind kept blowing him off it, he recalled, as cars exploded along his path.

He was one block from the house when he realized there was nothing he could do. “Everything was burning,” he said.

At 1:16 a.m., while flames still roared across Lahaina, a friend posted a picture of Keyiro on Facebook with a plea that said “missing please help.”

“Lahaina,” she wrote, “extremely worried about him.”

Someone suggested she call the Red Cross. “Already have twice and nothing,” she replied.

Vargas recalled praying late into the night.

“Where is he?” she asked. “Tell me.”

Keyiro’s biological mother, Rosalba Fuentes Bernal, had lived with Vargas and Garcia near Lahaina when the boy was a baby. The couple had watched him learn to walk in a grassy park by the ocean.

After a tumultuous childhood and various stops in the United States and Mexico, Keyiro moved back to Maui to live with Vargas and Garcia when he was in eighth grade.

Fuentes Bernal, who lives in Mexico City, told The Post that she considered Vargas a “sister” and made her and Garcia the boy’s legal guardians.

His family and friends described him as a funny and caring boy who loved animals and cared for Dexter, two cats, and 11 birds in their home. He was a fan of Goku, a monkey-tailed anime character known for his martial arts prowess.

The couple’s son, Josue Garcia, who considered Keyiro a brother, was teaching him to box, and Keyiro had developed a passion for the sport.

“He was the most charismatic, happiest little boy. He was a beautiful soul,” said Estrella Lopez, a longtime friend. “Josue, his brother, that’s his hero. He wanted to be like him.”

Vargas remembered their walks together with Dexter, and how the boy would put ice on her forehead when she had a headache.

“So caring, so devoted,” she said of Keyiro.

When Garcia and Vargas finally reached their home two days after the fire had passed, all that was left were a few breeze-block walls, the burned trunks of palm trees, and parts of the house’s frame.

Garcia discovered Keyiro’s remains in what had been his bedroom. He gently wrapped the boy in a tarp, he said, and carried him to the van.

He and his son, Josue, said they were unsure and fearful about what to do next. In desperation, Garcia drove to Citizen Church in Kahana and met his pastor, Juan Trevizo, 32, who ministers to the Spanish-speaking community in the area, and whose own home was destroyed by the fire.

Garcia asked Trevizo what he should do with the body. Trevizo didn’t know.

“Who has the answers for that?” Trevizo said. “Does he go to the police? Does he bury him? Literally, I had no answer.”

He encouraged Garcia to turn the remains over to the authorities. Garcia said he later delivered the body to police in Lahaina.

Fuentes Bernal said she was aware early on that her son had gone missing in the fire and hoped he would be found in a shelter. Vargas later told her he didn’t survive.

“I don’t know if he slept through it, or if he was wearing headphones, or he couldn’t leave and was trapped in the fire,” she said. “It is very sad.”

On Sunday afternoon, five days after the fire, Vargas sat on the ground in Honokowai Park, the same place where she had watched Keyiro learn to walk.

She cried and picked at the grass. She had been planning to celebrate Keyiro’s 15th birthday on Sunday. Now, she expects to hold a memorial service.

Brianna Sachs in Lahaina and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.