L.A. County courts tried to maintain business as usual during firestorm. It was anything but
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As the Eaton fire raged through Altadena, Begonya De Salvo was scrambling to figure out where her husband, two children and five pets would find shelter. Afraid her house might be reduced to ash, she said work was the last thing on her mind.
As she scrambled 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, L.A. County’s courts tried to conduct business as usual even as destructive fires burned from the Pacific Palisades to the San Gabriel Mountains.
Attorneys in the Pasadena courthouse, which remained open near the Altadena inferno, got sick and had to leave work, according to the president of the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors. Downtown, jurors panicked about missing evacuation notices when they couldn’t check their phones in court. Some defendants who lost their homes or were forced to flee infernos faced the threat of arrest for missing court, attorneys said.
The decision to keep courthouse doors open last week, even as smoke was wafting in, has been met with a mix of frustration and bemusement by the legal community.
Ryan Erlich, president of the Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys, recalled how during the Dodgers’ World Series celebration last year, the proceedings were canceled at L.A.’s main criminal courthouse, sometimes referred to as CCB.
“We closed CCB for a parade, and we left the Pasadena court 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 courthouse.”
Rob Oftring, a spokesman for the L.A. 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 shutdown for the Dodgers parade on Nov. 1 was necessary due to road closures in the area, according to Oftring, who noted all other courthouses remained open that day. Since the fires began, he wrote in an email, “Court leadership has actively monitored the evolving situation, adjusting court operations in coordination with local and state emergency officials.”
The court has also been “distributing N95 masks to all employees and jurors and temporarily closing affected courthouses,” he said.
Coverage of the fires ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, including stories about the devastation, issues firefighters faced and the weather.
The Sylmar juvenile court was shut down 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 scorch the Walk of Fame. Pasadena’s courthouse was closed on Jan. 9 but not the day prior, when the Eaton fire’s most immediate impacts were being felt. The Hollywood court was the only one subject to an evacuation order at any point since last week, Oftring said.
The morning after the Eaton fire erupted, Erlich said, the inside of the Pasadena courthouse smelled like a “tinderbox” and was unsafe to work in.
“It’s immediately downwind and two miles shy of the fire and evacuation zone. It created an immediate environmental concern,” he said. “We had deputies who upon coming into the court started to have headaches, eye irritation and other symptoms of being in an unhealthy environment.”
Erlich said several prosecutors and defense attorneys left early because they fell ill. Roughly 1 out of every 10 prosecutors in his union live in a fire evacuation zone, he estimated, and several lost homes in the fire. At least a dozen judges were unavailable because their homes burned down, and several public defenders said they had to be evacuated.
Even jailed 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 the Newhall and Antelope Valley courthouses on Jan. 8 due to road closures.
In the downtown L.A. courthouse, an acrid smoke scent hung in courtrooms throughout the sprawling 19-story structure. Deputy public defender Nicole Joens said several of her clients found themselves caught between the legal system and the flames.
Joens pointed to several examples of clients who either forgot their court date or simply couldn’t make it downtown in the immediate aftermath of the fires, which led to bench warrants for their arrest. Later in the week, she said, judges mercifully quashed the arrest warrants, but still some prosecutors pushed to revoke their bail.
In one case, Joens said, a prosecutor sought to have a defendant’s bail revoked over a probation violation because that defendant was now living in a hotel — one he’d been forced into because the Eaton fire swallowed his Altadena home.
“They’re in the daily food lines. They have nothing,” said Joens, who was also forced to evacuate for several days due to the Eaton Fire. “It seemed like a punishment that this family had no 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 out of fear it could negatively impact their criminal cases. The union called for all courthouses to be shut down last week, a move Joens said she didn’t agree with, but she believes some court officials and prosecutors needed to be more flexible given the infernos in the hills.
Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola died of drug overdoses in November 2021 after meeting “freelance entertainment planner” David Pearce. Prosecutors have since charged Pearce, who allegedly provided drugs to both women, with murder and multiple sexual assaults.
“There should have been more leniency,” she said. “Any D.A.’s objecting against like holding warrants or any of that stuff was ridiculous, given what we were dealing with.”
Diego Cartagena, head of the legal aid organization Bet Tzedek, said a systemwide court shutdown could have been incredibly problematic for clients who needed access to courthouses for pressing issues such as guardianship over a child with urgent medical needs or those seeking domestic violence restraining orders.
“It’s a fundamental access-to-justice issue when it comes to the communities that we serve,” he said.
Cartagena added that the court could improve remote access for the public so that, in the future, those affected by disasters 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 a few miles north of her residence, and she feared it might advance on her home while she was in court and unable to receive an evacuation warning.
“When there was a wildfire raging, something should have been done so we could attend to our own survival needs,” Hsu said. “I don’t think it benefits the court either if people are worrying 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 understood that some might need to do the same. Once the trial started, she said, jurors would have to leave their phones off while court was in session.
By late afternoon, Hsu got struck from the jury and went home. As soon as she got near, her phone buzzed with an evacuation warning.
The Los Angeles-based Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to ending mass incarceration, started a fundraiser on Friday to support the fire crews of California’s prisons.
“How can they expect people to concentrate on the case when we don’t know if we have to evacuate?” she asked.
This is not the first time the court’s handling of a disaster has attracted major 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 oversight body found that the courts had failed to properly report that an employee had been hospitalized with COVID-19, and failed to implement an effective illness and injury prevention program and correct unhealthy practices, including a lack of COVID-19 prevention training to interpreters.
De Salvo, vice president of the interpreters union, said she was shocked to receive an e-mail that she would have her pay docked the day after the fires while she was trying to figure out how much damage her house had sustained.
“Please note that numerous other employees who were also impacted by the fires managed to call out as required, and we appreciate their diligence during such a difficult time,” read the e-mail from De Salvo’s supervisor.
The CEO’s office granted “special leave” that would spare employees like De Salvo from losing pay late last week, records show. Still, she described the actions of the court’s leadership as “heartless.”
“What did you want me to do? This is a catastrophe. 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 that?”
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