After Katrina, family claws back
In 10 years since, a Mississippi clan struggled to rebuild
The photograph was a snapshot of desperation: a tawny-haired boy wearing nothing but a muddied pair of shorts, sitting on top of a collapsed fence in Biloxi, Miss. Mounds of debris filled the frame around him. He held his head in one hand, and a soggy teddy bear lay facedown at his feet.
The image, which ran Sept. 1, 2005, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, showed how Hurricane Katrina had laid waste to the Mississippi coast, a place where thousands were displaced and few journalists had ventured as the focus stayed on the devastation in New Orleans.
It also captured the moment 7-year-old Dillion Chancey realized what he had lost. Dillion, along with his parents, had clung to treetops and neighbors’ rooftops to withstand the deadly storm surge after his
home disappeared under the debris. A couple of days earlier, Dillion had complained to his mother that there was nothing to do.
“You’ve got a room full of toys,” his mother, Sarah Fairchild, remembers chiding. “So many children in the world don’t even have that.”
Now he sat on the felled piece of fence, another child’s abandoned bear next to him, and he was stunned into silence. “Mama, I really don’t have any toys now,” he said.
“We’ll get more,” Fairchild told him.
Taken by Times staff photographer Carolyn Cole, the image became an emblem of the national drama that followed Hurricane Katrina, which left more than 1,800 people dead, displaced a million others and laid bare the vulnerabilities of the nation’s emergency infrastructure.
In the 10 years since, this family has struggled, taking up residence in a trailer and then a mobile home, working at odd jobs, and making ends meet at times with the kindness of strangers and the generosity of one wealthy Pasadena man.
Now, as teachers at his high school were talking about the storm’s 10-year anniversary and asked students to share their recollections, Dillion pulled up The Times’ photo on his phone. He said his classmates, some of whom had seen Katrina’s devastation firsthand, were still awestruck by the image. Dillion has seen the photograph all over the Internet, but he doesn’t often look at it. Asked to describe the moment captured in it, he said it’s hard for him to talk about.
Fairchild’s promise to her son that the family would recover was eventually fulfilled. But it took a long time. She and Dillion’s father, Bobby Danny Chancey, at first got to work helping locals repair damaged roofs and rebuild homes that had washed away along with their own.
“If you can believe it, we’ve never really cried at any point” in the 10 years that have passed, Fairchild said. There was no room for that. “After making it through the storm itself, I figured there was a plan for me, and I just had to take it a step at a time, a day at a time, and get there.”
Fairchild, 47, who made decent money as a dealer at a casino before Katrina, took jobs at Dollar General, Hobby Lobby and Waffle House. The couple, who never married, tried to get ahead by starting a business rehabilitating flea market furniture, but it went belly up about a year later. Even so, Fairchild said, “we’ve managed day to day for our basic needs.”
She credits God and help from strangers for the family’s survival. After The Times ran a front-page story about their plight, dozens of strangers sent them letters, Fairchild said, some with checks for $50 or $100. “Buy something for Dillion with it,” notes said. Many asked how they were faring, if there was anything they could do, if Dillion had a bicycle to ride. The random kindnesses lasted about a year.
Art Gastelum, a Pasadena business executive whose company manages government construction projects, also saw the story. “I saw that photo and that little boy just over a pile of trash, with his head down. Like the thinking man,” said Gastelum, referring to the famous Rodin statue.
A former lobbyist and longtime aide to former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Gastelum couldn’t get the image out of his mind. “It just broke my heart,” he said.
He f lew the family to California to send Dillion and his parents on their first and only trip to Disneyland.
“Just talking to them and hearing their story, how they were facing death, it was heartbreaking,” Gastelum recalled.
Dillion remembers the trip fondly. “I didn’t make it through all the rides. But I know I didn’t like that Space Mountain one,” he said. After a pause, he added, “Maybe now I would.”
They stayed several days, and Gastelum also gave the family a 27-foot-long motor home, which they drove back to Mississippi in late October 2005. Fairchild remembers stopping in San Antonio for Halloween, so Dillion could go trick-ortreating.
For nearly two years, the family lived in that motor home on a pine-filled property they owned that was farther north than the home that had been destroyed — and farther away from the water.
These days, they live on the property in a former shed that Chancey, 57, crafted into a two-bedroom house. Fairchild has envisioned building her dream home there, with stone on the outside and a wraparound porch. So far, only the foundation has been poured.
Fairchild says she’s hoping to change that. Three years ago, she was able to get a casino job again, and with Chancey’s steady handyman work, the family is on more stable ground. “Soon, maybe, we’ll be able to make a big step in that direction,” she said.
As for Dillion, now 17, “He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s tried to do right and be a good person,” his mother said. Dillion fell behind in classes this spring and is retaking some sophomore year courses, but he’s assured his parents he’ll be on track by year’s end. Over the summer, he took a job at a shrimp processing plant in Biloxi. He saved enough money to buy his first truck, a 1994 Ford F-150, and hopes to get his driver’s license soon. Dillion loves fishing and being outdoors and says he wants to be a game warden to help regulate hunting and fishing.
“We came a long ways,” Dillion said this week. “I didn’t even have no clothes after Katrina. I had the pair of shorts that I had in that picture, and that was it. I got clothes on my back now.”
Looking back on the photograph of himself all those years ago isn’t necessarily painful, he said.
“It don’t bother me to look at it, but it’s not something I turn back to every day,” he said. “Really, I feel that it’s a part of my past, and that’s where I like to keep it. It ain’t something I’m going to sit and cry about.”