‘I’m in shock’: He made it, friends didn’t. Now his video stirs anger
PARADISE, Butte County — Greg Woodcox pleaded with his friends to leave everything behind and flee. The firestorm that would become known as the Camp Fire was bearing down on their rural home. They had only seconds to get out.
Despite Woodcox’s efforts to save the small group, a fastmoving wall of flames overtook their vehicles as they bunched up behind him at the end of Edgewood Lane on Thursday morning.
Had they gotten out mere seconds sooner, they might have made it out, too, he said.
“I’m in shock,” Woodcox, 58, said in a tearful interview Sunday. “Those poor souls. I tried to get them out, but we were trapped like rats.”
As it happens, the five deaths Woodcox witnessed were the first fatalities officials documented in the Camp Fire, in which the death toll had grown to 29 by Sunday. Moved to record what he saw, he captured the scene with his phone — a video that would later anger many fellow survivors as it spread online.
Woodcox recounted Sunday the horror of watching a close friend, the man’s mother and three others die before turning and running for his own life. A fox, he said, scrambled across the road and showed him a path down a steep embankment into a stream, where he stayed submerged for 45 minutes, waiting out the relentless inferno.
“I don’t know how I made it,” he said. “I got in a 3-foot deep V-cut in the stream. This thing came over me and roared like a furnace from hell. I said, ‘Oh Lord, no, no.’ ”
After surviving the intense flames, he hiked up the firescarred hillside. Back on Edgewood Lane, he found his Jeep Cherokee about 40 yards from the charred vehicles with the engine still running and his two Chihuahuas, Romey and Jules, alive in the back seat.
“I can’t believe my truck and my dogs made it,” he said. “I can’t wrap my brain around it. This is the Holy Spirit at work.”
His first instinct was to begin documenting what had happened, so he grabbed his phone inside his car and started recording, capturing the fire’s horrific aftermath, including the grisly remains of his dead friends.
The footage is stark, offering a rare and brutal view of a wildfire’s ferocity and danger. The skeletal remains of several victims are charred beyond recognition no more than an hour after the siege hit.
“Nobody made it,” Woodcox says in the video. “These people all got burned out. I was right down below them here. My friend, you can see he’s dead, and his mother.”
Woodcox’s nephew, Matthew Strausbaugh, later posted the footage on YouTube, causing an uproar in Paradise, where many residents have been talking about it and are outraged.
“That was so insensitive,” Tamara Houston said of the video as she and others rescued trapped horses around the community Sunday. “You don’t need to show people’s remains in the middle of such a horrible tragedy.”
Strausbaugh said he was torn on whether to post the video. He offered it to several local television stations and said he was even scolded by a local reporter because of the content.
“I figured the good and the bad of releasing it,” he said. “It shows some horrific things, but on the other hand, if one person sees that video and that saves one person, then their deaths are not in vain.”
Strausbaugh said he’s been getting positive feedback from the video, too. Many commenters empathize with Woodcox, who is clearly traumatized by what happened.
Woodcox, a self-described “mountain person,” lives mostly out of his green Jeep, where he keeps a metal detector to search for gold in the rural canyons around Paradise.
He is thin with a thick mustache surrounded by gray stubble. He admitted to a past that included stints in state prison for drugs and other charges. He said he is bipolar and “high strung,” speaking in fragmented bursts. On Saturday, he said, he had a nervous breakdown after processing what he’d been through.
The morning of the fire, he was visiting a dog park when he spotted the flames coming toward town. Feeling the intense winds and watching the fire explode in size, he got in his sport utility vehicle and began warning people about the nearing monster.
After alerting his adult son and ex-wife at their separate homes, he headed to the end of Edgewood where his paraplegic friend lived with his mom.
“I said, ‘Get out! You’re going to die if you don’t get out!’ ” Woodcox recalled. “I did everything I could do. I dragged one of them to the car.”
He led the caravan of vehicles, which included more neighbors, down the small roadway, but one of the cars got stuck and the others following it were hemmed in as Woodcox continued down the road. When he turned around, it was too late. Fire had overtaken the cars, with glass shattering in loud pops, he said.
He figured he was next, so he turned to the flames, said a prayer and prepared to meet the God he’d recently started believing in.
“I saw a fox was running for his life, so I said, ‘No Lord, we’re coming, too,’ ” he said.
When he got to the stream at the bottom of the ravine, he began to panic as the water turned from chilly to the “hottest hot tub I’ve ever felt,” he said. He remembered learning to steady his breathing through martial arts training and relaxed himself as the fire roared overhead “like a freight train.”
“When I got back and saw my dogs, I was crying and barely holding myself,” he said.
His Jeep still drives, but much of the plastic, including the bumpers, tail lights and other pieces on the outside of the vehicle melted. He’s been sleeping in the SUV at area rest stops, driving around during the day, thinking about his ordeal.
“It’s just really hard — I’m traumatized,” he said. “But I have to believe what I went through was for a reason.”