It’s an even worse version of Uvalde out in Hawaii, where emergency authorities allegedly stopped parents from looking through an area to rescue their family members, including children, and numerous casualties resulted. One woman spoke out after she was prevented from searching for her son, who died in the area in which she wanted to search for him, and his corpse was found clutching the body of the family dog.
The young man killed by the fires and doomed by the feckless emergency response was Keyiro Fuentes. He died just days before his 15th birthday and was at home, alone, on the last day of summer vacation when the flames ripped through his town, Lahaina.
His adoptive mother tried to get home from the cleaning service she runs (she was working just 5 miles away at the time) to rescue him, but was allegedly prevented from doing so by emergency authorities. She apparently tried running into the area because traffic was at a stopped standstill.
She said she was told not to go and that she encountered a police barricade, which stopped her. “I was told, ‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ but I responded, ‘My son.’ I threw myself on the floor, lifted my hands up and begged God,” she said.
She eventually ran past the officers and a man on a motorcycle took her to the fire’s frontline. She was told by the emergency responders in the area that the area was cleared. They told her that no one was there and not to search for her son, but rather to have faith that he got out.
He did not make it out. Whoever “cleared” the area didn’t find him or rescue him. Instead, when Ms. Vargas made it home two days later, she found his lifeless body clutching their family dog in the devastated home. “He was not as I expected, in ashes. God maintained him like this. So, we knew it was him,” she said.
His brother, Josue Garcia Vargas, said, “I wish I could’ve made more memories with him. He was too young. If he still had time. I know he would’ve been a very, very, very good man.”
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With the death of many children having occurred during the fire, President Biden was skewered for giving a speech on the island in which he attempted to show his shared feeling of pain with the devastated island’s residents by bringing up a time when he almost lost his Corvette in a house fire.
He said, “I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it’s like to lose a home. Years ago — now 15 years ago — I was in Washington doing ‘Meet the Press.’ It was a sunny Sunday, and lightning struck at home on a little lake that’s outside of our home — not a lake, a big pond — and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating ducts — the air conditioning ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ‘67 Corvette, and my cat. But all kidding aside, I watched the firefighters, the way they responded.“