Rescue in Fountaingrove: Tubbs Fire heroes recount dramatic evacuation at Santa Rosa care home

Had those 60-some residents of Villa Capri died at the doomed property that night, the Tubbs Fire casualty list would have grown from 22 to a number approaching the 2019 Camp Fire, far and away the deadliest wildfire in California history at 85 casualties.

Though the broad outline of what happened that night has been documented, many of the details of the dramatic rescue have never been publicly revealed until now.

‘A total fiasco’

It was about 2 a.m. in the orange-black glow of Oct. 9 when Mark and Kathy Allen arrived at Villa Capri. They had called earlier to inquire about the safety of Mark’s mother, Helen Allen, and other residents when they learned of the fire raging through the Mayacamas Mountains.

Troubled by the glib response they received, they made an arduous trip from their Sebastopol home into Fountaingrove, braking for tree limbs felled by hurricane-force winds.

By the time they arrived, fire already was visible on the ridge above Villa Capri. The power was out, and the sprawling 63-unit structure was dark. A staff member let them in the locked front door. There they found about a dozen residents sitting calmly on chairs, couches and in wheelchairs.

Four women were working. Kathy asked what their strategy was.

The employees said they’d spoken by phone to a supervisor and were waiting for her arrival or for further instructions. But it had been 40 minutes since they’d last talked to her.

It didn’t appear the supervisor was coming, Mark and Kathy Allen told The Press Democrat.

State law required the facility to have a disaster plan that included phone numbers for managers and instructions for evacuating those with disabilities or dementia. The four employees knew of no plan, Mark Allen said. In the parking lot were several company vans and buses; the employees didn’t have keys.

“This is a total fiasco,” Mark Allen remembered thinking.

The Allens realized that if the residents — including Helen Allen, who was 89 — were to get out, it was on these two retired teachers to make it happen. They used a flashlight and a cellphone to illuminate their way to the memory care wing, where residents with the most severe dementia lived.

Mark and Kathy went room to room, waking up residents, helping them into wheelchairs and wheeling them out to the lobby.

“I don’t remember being frightened or angry,” Kathy said. “We were just taking our time, one problem at a time, assuming this was all going to work out.”

The white cat

About 10 minutes after the Allens arrived, Melissa Langhals got to Villa Capri. She had woken up at her Rincon Valley home maybe a half hour earlier and — after smelling smoke and seeing a glowing horizon to the east — began to worry about her bedridden 82-year-old mother, Virginia Gunn. Langhals made a beeline into Fountaingrove.

When she learned staff had no formal plan or supervision, “I was really pissed,” Langhals said.

Langhals went to her mother, in an upstairs bedroom toward the back of the facility. Gunn was sound asleep. Everyone was. Langhals roused her mom and told her to be prepared to move.

In that moment, Langhals, a retired electrician, made a chilling calculus.

“I thought, my mother is gonna have to be the last one out,” Langhals recalled. “Otherwise, I won’t have the drive to get the others out. And she was. She was the last.”

Using master keys and a flashlight handed to her by a staffer, Langhals started getting residents out of their rooms. One elderly woman in an apartment had a pet cat. The frightened animal dove under the bed and wouldn’t let Langhals touch her.

She gave up.

“I think that was the only fatality up there that night,” Langhals said. “It was a white cat.”

‘I’m gonna burn here’

Mark Allen, after moving several people out of their rooms, headed for his mother’s on the second floor. Helen had dementia and required a wheelchair to get around. Mark helped her into a sweatshirt, pants and shoes, lifted her into the chair and propelled her to the upstairs landing.

Langhals was checking rooms, too, she said, when she realized a couple of the Villa Capri employees she thought were helping had taken off.

“I don’t blame any of those workers for leaving,” Langhals insisted. “They were scared for their lives.”

At about 2:30 a.m., according to the lawsuit filed by the families of 10 residents, two maintenance workers arrived and asked Kathy Allen what the plan was. “There is no plan,” she replied.

Like their predecessors, the men had no keys for the company vehicles, according to the lawsuit. But they helped Kathy to rouse and move more people into position to evacuate.

Some residents handled business themselves. The lawsuit describes a man named Leonard Kulwiec, 92, who made it to the darkened upper landing but couldn’t descend the stairs because of limited mobility. He rolled himself down, allegedly injuring an arm and a knee, before joining others on the first floor.

Ruth Callen, a 92-year-old widow, also dressed and found her own way to the common area.

“She always took the elevator. She couldn’t move well,” Tim Callen said of his mother. “It was hot, smoky. She had her nightgown on. And I’ve always said… Mom’s standing on top of the stairs. And her husband, my Dad, said, ‘Come on, Ruth, you got this. Come on down.’”

Ruth Callen’s father was a firefighter. So were her two brothers and each of her three sons. Her son-in-law, too. None of them could help her now.

Ruth thought to herself, “I’ve got all these firefighters in my family, and I’m gonna burn here,” she later told her daughter and namesake, Ruthie Kurpinsky.

The goodbye call

At about 2:45 a.m., a fourth relative arrived. Joey Horsman, an off-duty Sonoma County Sheriff’s detective, came from his Santa Rosa home to check on his grandmother, Inez Glynn, according to the lawsuit.

Horsman has rarely spoken publicly of that night, and did not respond to recent interview requests.

After a worker let him inside, Horsman used a flashlight he’d brought to navigate to the rear unit of memory care. Smoke had begun to penetrate the building. Horsman asked an employee to tell him who was in charge. He got no response, the legal document said.

Finally, one of the maintenance workers produced a key to a facility van. At about 3 a.m., Horsman drove eight people, including his grandmother and one caregiver, down to central Santa Rosa, past hillsides lit by burning buildings. He dropped them off outside a probation office at the county administration center, then headed back up the hill for more people.

“When he got to Villa Capri he saw a wall of flames” and assumed the residents left behind were dead, the lawsuit read. Horsman turned the van around to head back to the seniors at the county center. Fire now blocked his exit.

“Because of the flames, he called his pregnant wife to say goodbye to her,” according to the suit.

But Horsman made it down the hill. He scooped up his load of passengers and took them to a Santa Rosa church.

‘I hope I see them again’

About the time Horsman left the facility, someone found the keys to an Oakmont short bus. Mark Allen helped load 15 or 16 ambulatory people onto the vehicle. Kathy wrote down names and room numbers as they boarded.

The fire was getting closer. Landscaping near the building was burning, and the smoke was thick.

Mark Allen’s mother remained inside a little after 3 a.m. Kathy looked at her husband hard and said, “You didn’t come here not to save your mother,” Mark recalled, emotional at the memory.

So, he went to Helen and wheeled her out, pretending they were going back to her room to get something and feeling demoralized at leaving others behind.

“I looked at all the faces of the people I’ve known some five years and I’m wheeling my mom past them,” he said. “I took a back way so they wouldn’t see me go out with her,” thinking, “I hope I see these people again.”

Helen Allen, Ruth Callen and five others were nestled into Mark and Kathy’s Chevrolet Suburban. As they pulled away, the ever-buoyant Ruth Callen volunteered, “Guess what, kids? We’re not barbecued chicken tonight. We got out.”

One of the on-site workers filled her car with residents and followed Mark Allen down the hill, so Mark would be able to return for more people.

During his drive out, a Villa Capri manager told him by phone not to return to the care home, saying a school bus was headed to Villa Capri to evacuate remaining residents.

No bus ever arrived, the suit alleged.

Wrong side of the glass

It was about 3:30 a.m., and Kathy Allen and Langhals were the only people left to help the remaining 24 residents.

They headed toward the front entrance and realized a gust had blown the lobby door shut. One of them rattled the handle. They were locked outside.

Sitting in the entryway and calmly blinking at the women were more than a dozen seniors, including Langhals’ mother. But none of them could walk or grasp that someone needed to open the door.

As flames advanced down a slope on the east side of Villa Capri, Allen swung her Maglite flashlight into the glass as hard as she could. It bounced harmlessly off the double-paned safety glass. They needed something heavier.

Langhals had an idea.

She detached a heavy part from the tow hitch on her Jeep Cherokee and swung it at the door. The glass shattered. They used the slide as a doorstop so they wouldn’t get locked out again.

The smoke inside was getting thicker.

Langhals counted: 14 people downstairs, 10 upstairs. No one could walk on their own, and the elevator wasn’t working. The teammates worked together, one resident at a time. It was an inelegant operation.

Fearing those in wheelchairs might slide out as they backed down the steps, Allen and Langhals tied them in with bedsheets. One woman in a wheelchair lost a prosthetic foot, which rattled down the steps.

She accepted it from her apologetic rescuers when they reached the bottom, Kathy Allen said.

The rescue effort got sidetracked at one point when an old woman waiting in Langhals’ car extricated herself and began wandering. When Allen dashed out to retrieve the lady, she spotted a police car headed for Varenna, a retirement and assisted living facility next door that was also owned by Oakmont Senior Living.

Allen waved her flashlight and caught the officer’s attention. He was headed to an emergency but promised to come back. He returned at about 4 a.m. with three fellow officers, all in separate cars.

Langhals and Allen hurriedly explained they needed help getting immobile elders down the stairs. One of the cops replied, “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t touch them. That’s not our protocol.”

“F--- your protocol!” Langhals shot back. “We need you to get up there.”

As an electrician, Langhals is not a stranger to colorful language. She let fly a string of follow-up curses.

“Mom looked at me and said, ‘Missy! Stop dropping F-bombs left and right,’” Langhals said.

But it worked.

The officer slapped his flashlight into Langhals’ hand and told her to illuminate the stairs while the public servants did the lifting.

The bus was too long

When everyone finally was out of the building, one of the officers radioed emergency officials and asked them to send a city bus. Five residents went into Langhals’ car.

As they sped down the parkway, one of the old ladies scolded the driver, “I would have gone the other direction.”

Langhals still laughs at the memory.

Kathy Allen decided to wait for the final bus with the last of the residents.

“I didn’t know who would receive them or help them,” Allen explained. “I needed to stay with them so I could get to where their final destination was.”

The bus pulled up to the chaotic scene at about 4:30 a.m., according to the lawsuit. At that point, the air was “choke-you kind of smoky,” Allen said. Flames licked at one wall of the building. Embers were thick, a multistory fireworks show in the hot wind.

Allen accompanied the last seven residents, all in wheelchairs, onto the city bus. There was no way to secure the chairs or belt the residents, the suit said.

One woman who had allegedly been injured during the evacuation, possibly with a broken bone, had to be laid flat on the bus floor. Another had slipped from her wheelchair, her catheter coming free, Allen said.

Around 5 a.m., a couple hours shy of sunrise, the bus began its exit. But it was too long to make the turn out of the parking lot. The driver inched forward and backward repeatedly, turning the wheels left and right in an excruciating effort to find the angle.

He smacked a kiosk on his final turn and was free.

Somehow, four unwitting relatives had spontaneously orchestrated the evacuation of about 60 isolated seniors. Five years later, they insist they are not heroes.

In fact, Kathy Allen’s primary residual emotion from that night is regret.

“What haunts me is what more I could have done. That’s what bothers me at night,” she said. “I should have gone back and gotten that man’s glasses. I couldn’t find the keys to the med office, to find the big binder (of patient records). Why didn’t I just break the glass?”

Counting gains and losses

While Ruth Callen, Helen Allen, Virginia Gunn and Alice Eurotas all lived to see another day, their quality of life varied in the wake of the evacuation.

Callen eventually reunited with other Villa Capri survivors. She wound up at the same assisted living community as fellow residents Barbara Bendik, Margaret Birkhofer, Chuck Murphy and Christine Pedroncelli. Bound by a disaster, they would regularly gather around a dining table at Brookdale Windsor.

Often they ate in subdued silence. Sometimes they’d swap stories.

“They were friends at Villa Capri, and they were better friends there,” said Marlene Callen, Ruth’s daughter-in-law. “There was a camaraderie.”

Ruth Callen became more withdrawn after the Tubbs Fire, her relatives said. She lived for an additional year and a half, and enjoyed a steady stream of visitors — children, grandchildren, adult nieces and nephews. She spent time watching the Hallmark Channel or old cowboy movies.

Ruth Callen loved the Brookdale staff and bought them See’s Candies.

“I have a feeling that after the incident she wanted them to know exactly where she was,” said her daughter, Ruthie Kurpinsky.

Others, however, declined rapidly following the trauma of that frantic night in October and the subsequent search for long-term housing.

Gunn, Langhals’ mother, died two months after Tubbs and spent that time disoriented, hallucinating and grieving for the home she had lost in Fountaingrove.

“It was heart-rending,” another of Gunn’s daughters, Cecilia Sanchez, wrote in an email to The Press Democrat. “She was a completely different person and had lost all will to live. Her spark had died. Yes, it was nice that she physically survived the fire, but she also died with it.”

Eurotas is alive today at 89. But, said her daughter Beth Eurotas-Steffy, “for my mom, there are no happy stories.”

Helen Allen died four months after the fire. She had blossomed at Villa Capri, Mark and Kathy Allen said. But as she bounced around post-Tubbs, her memory failing, Helen began to ask over and over, “When can I go home?”

While acknowledging their grief and resentment, Mark and Kathy Allen can’t deny what they did the night of Oct. 8-9, 2017, had meaning. They too got something out of it.

They were able to say goodbye to Helen, to psychologically prepare for her passing and walk her up to the edge of life.

The alternative, a likely reality for dozens of families were it not for the Allens and Melissa Langhals and Joey Horsman, is too dark to consider.

“To wake up the next morning and find out that your mom’s gone, and that she had to go through a fire to die?” Mark said, shaking his head.

“I can’t even imagine the emotional wreckage that would be.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.