WINE COUNTRY FIRES Saving homes turns into searing regret
Hero filled with remorse after friends’ houses red-tagged
God woke you up, you’re sure of it. He kicked you in the head as smoke filled the room. “Look out the back window,” came the voice. So you did. What you saw at 3 a.m. at the Journey’s End mobile home park in Santa Rosa was orange light where it shouldn’t have been. Row after row of tightly packed units were ablaze along Highway 101. You didn’t want to die, not like this, so you got in your pickup and drove away. Then you turned around. People were screaming and embers filled the sky. You had firefighting training and knew you could help. Someone handed you a fire hose, and you stayed for hours, until 8:30 in the morning, until the roaring of the flames quieted. One row of homes survived the night, thanks to you. In the days ahead,
“I’ve seen and suffered and hurt and anguished over this.” Priest Morgan, who saved friends’ homes from the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa
you’d be hailed as a savior in the community and in the news, given a spontaneous ovation at the post office.
But if you could relive that night in October, you’d get back in the truck and keep driving.
You’d let it all burn.
Priest Morgan’s real name is Robert, but the hero of Journey’s End hasn’t gone by that in five decades, not since he was 11 years old and started playacting the role of local psychiatrist in his East Los Angeles subdivision. “East LOS” is tattooed on his right forearm.
His father left before he was born, and Priest was raised by a single mother in the crimeridden neighborhood. She later remarried, and his sister was born when he was 7. He lost 10 cousins to gang violence, he said, and was knifed twice and shot once in the hip.
“It was crazy back then,” Morgan said. “You would walk to school and see shootouts and bodies in the gutter.”
Priest wasn’t interested in joining a gang. “God puts you places to help people,” his mom would tell him. So he tried to be in the right places.
He could get anyone to talk to him, and he liked untangling problems. The neighbors called him “Pastor” and eventually “Priest.” If you call out for him on the street now — “Robert!” — he won’t turn around. That early nickname became his identity.
It’s how the low-income seniors at Journey’s End saw Morgan, too. There were 161 trailers in the 13.5-acre park, where Morgan, 61, was one of the more able-bodied.
He caulked one woman’s roof. He changed a man’s bandages after surgery. He hoisted couches and deciphered legal paperwork.
“Come on,” Morgan would say. “I’ll take care of you. I can do it for free or cheaper. Just call me.”
He joked about buying a walker to blend into the community. The seniors gave him — as his childhood neighbors once did — a sense of purpose. Morgan was there for them when others weren’t. They baked him chocolate chip cookies and always remembered his birthday.
When the Tubbs Fire came rolling down from the forested hills east of Santa Rosa on the night of Oct. 8, Morgan knew his purpose. Firefighters were focused on evacuating and saving the Kaiser hospital next door, so they cut a hole in the chain-link fence and passed Morgan a thick hose.
As he fought the flames threatening units on Sahara Drive, he paused only to follow the sound of a barking dog and rescue the animal’s owner — a woman in a wheelchair in a nearby trailer. A captain and three other firefighters eventually joined to help.
Protecting a portion of Journey’s End may have saved additional lives.
“As my focus was on the Kaiser evacuation, part of that plan of success heavily relied on your ... efforts to hold that last row of homes on Sahara Street,” Jason Jenkins, a battalion chief for the Santa Rosa Fire Department, wrote in an email to Morgan in February. “I am doubtful that Kaiser would have made it without Sahara Street.”
As morning dawned Oct. 9 — a blood-red sun rising behind soot and smoke — the line of mobile homes beyond Sahara Drive and bordering Kaiser was still standing.
It was a small miracle amid a night of horror. Or was it?
California had never seen the like of the Tubbs Fire, which killed 24 people and leveled 5,600 homes, businesses and other structures in Sonoma County.
The flames killed two residents of Journey’s End, incinerated 121 homes and melted the new gas and electric system. The 40 surviving units — the ones Morgan helped save — were contaminated by smoke and asbestos and red-tagged.
Ten months later, the residents of those units are stuck. Those who had insurance can’t collect a settlement because the units are standing, and they can’t go home because the land is condemned. A nonprofit housing organization plans to build a mix of affordable and market-rate condos on the wrecked lot.
“Insurance companies don’t cover that,” said Ronit Rubinoff, executive director of Legal Aid of Sonoma County, a nonprofit group that helps lowincome households. “Because the park was closed by government action, they said the condemnation applies, and we don’t have to cover it. But the reason the park closed was because a wildfire destroyed it first.”
A cluster of residents lives in the Sandman Hotel, just across Highway 101. Sometimes, they leave voice mails on Morgan’s phone. They talk about suicide. Most don’t blame Morgan, but they wish their homes had burned down.
Here is the agony of doing right and then seeing it turned upside down. Morgan is consumed with guilt.
“I don’t know a single fireman that has ever regretted saving someone’s house,” he said, crying. “I feel like I should have minded my own business. It’s been a thorn for me. The tears, that’s not me. I’m a pretty bad-ass dude. But I’ve seen and suffered and hurt and anguished over this.”
And so Morgan thinks back to that night, over and over. He is in the truck speeding away, and he doesn’t stop. He drives until the glow of Journey’s End is a smudge on the dark horizon.
On a recent morning, Morgan paced across the carpeted floor of his trailer at Lamplighter Mobile Home Park in Santa Rosa. His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked with gel, and tattoos snaked under the sleeve of his T-shirt.
He has a new unit that he rents for $1,200 a month, a good bit more than the $905 he paid before the fire. Bird feathers and knickknacks fill the space. He has a home, but his community is gone.
Morgan is retired from his various former jobs and pursuits: a combat medic with the U.S. Army, a paramedic firefighter for the Diamond Springs Fire Department in El Dorado County, a physical therapist, a law school dropout and a drug counselor for Lake County. He once started a production company, and he managed rental properties. He’s divorced and lives alone.
He funnels his anger and guilt into helping the seniors from Journey’s End. It’s his atonement for saving their homes that night. It’s also just who he is.
“I should’ve died that morning,” Morgan said. “I shouldn’t have woken up. Nobody wakes up who is sleeping in that kind of smoke for that many hours. Mom tells me, ‘God puts you in places to help people.’ She’s always told me that. That’s what I’m here for.” As he paces, he plans. After the Tubbs Fire, he wrote what he calls the Martha Sue Sinnott Law. In the confusion of those early morning hours, Sinnott was left in her trailer, and she might have died if Morgan hadn’t heard the yapping of her dog and helped her evacuate. Two other disabled residents died in the park that night.
Sinnott’s law would implement a universal sign system for people with mobility issues, with emergency placards affixed near their front doors. Morgan has written to the state Department of Emergency Services, as well as Sen. Kamala Harris and others, seeking support.
The text of the proposal is littered with random capitalization, because some things are too important to lowercase. He sees his friends from Journey’s End suffering, and he has to do something.
“Come on, people, they’re hurting,” Morgan said. “Their friends burned to death. There’s all this crap going on. Quit dragging them through the past for nothing. They’re still no closer to moving on. Come on, really? I’ve never cried this much in my life.”
He’s running out of time. Maybe that’s why he can’t let go of what happened at Journey’s End.
Morgan was diagnosed with advanced liver disease this year. It feels like the flu but “multiplied by 10,” and the medicine sometimes muddles his head. He has hepatitis C, which became symptomatic in 2003. Some days, he can’t get up. He’s too fatigued from the dry heaving and the weight loss.
“The doctor said, ‘You have third-stage liver disease,’ ” Morgan said. “What the hell, what happened to stage one and two? Come on. I don’t care about dying — I’ve had a full life — though a little more of a headsup would’ve been nice.”
He doesn’t talk about being sick because he doesn’t want to worry his old friends. But the news spread anyway to people like Inger Simonsen, 72, who lived a few doors down from Morgan before the fire and is now in the tiny community of Hemet in Riverside County.
Morgan used to trim branches from the tree in Simonsen’s front yard every spring. It’s still standing, as is her mobile home.
“He did the right thing for all of the right reasons,” Simonsen said with a sigh. “I know people are angry at him, and I’m sorry about that, because he doesn’t deserve that kind of heartache. People are bitter because they’ve been floating in limbo. It’s hard to live with. I think it’s just going to take a while for them to come around.”
Morgan saved Lois Smith’s trailer on Sahara Drive, too. She moved to El Christo Mobile Home Park, about 10 miles away on the opposite side of Santa Rosa. She doesn’t begrudge him, though she admits life would be easier if her home had burned.
“It’s the way the insurance companies are,” she said. “They are terrible. At least he did his best in saving the people. That’s his nature. It’s just the type of person he is.”
Morgan finds little comfort in their words. He listens to every victim’s voice mail, agonizing over their plight and his own actions.
What did God mean when he kicked Morgan awake? What was the right thing to do? Was there a right thing?
“My main worry is one of them is going to die before they get their home back again,” Morgan said. “And that’s going to hurt. When you get that old, you don’t have a whole lot. Your home is your safe place, your castle. And they don’t have it.”