America’s unluckiest household lose their most valuable possession to LA wildfire
A Los Angeles couple has spoken of their heartbreak after losing the ashes of their one-year-old daughter in the catastrophic wildfires.
Holding back the tears, Giorgi and Leonardo Antinori revealed how they lost the remains of their firstborn, Vita, who died 15 years ago, when their home went up in smoke.
Worse still, the couple has no idea how to rebuild their lives, as they stopped paying their fast-rising insurance premiums when COVID-era lockdowns left them in financial ruin.
A GoFundMe has so far raised $68,000 for the couple, and their two-year-old daughter, but that won’t be anywhere near enough for them to recover from the devastating blazes.
‘We had a daughter 15 years ago. She’d be 15, and she passed away when she was one, and her ashes were in our home, and they’re gone,’ Giorgi, 37, a music producer, told CNN.
‘Every memory, every piece of physical evidence of her life, is just gone. And that hurts. I feel numb right now because I feel like I’ve cried all of my emotions.’
The Antinori family lived in a blue wooden bungalow in the Palisades Bowl.
The mobile home community on Pacific Coast Highway is just across from the beach; all of its nearly 200 homes were destroyed.
The couple run NewVine Music & Publishing, but have struggled financially since COVID-era lockdowns hurt their business
The couple’s first daughter Vita died 15 years ago, they said in a tribute to the beloved infant
They evacuated with their two-year-old daughter as the fire spread — and returned afterward to find nothing remained but heaps of ash and a few charred palm trees swaying in the breeze.
‘It’s so mind-boggling what happened and so tragic that you just don’t have words for it,’ said Antinori, 41, who runs NewVine Music & Publishing with his wife.
The Antinoris say they’ll struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of the calamity because they were not able to keep up paying insurance premiums on their home.
They’d struggled to make their business profitable during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns and could not keep up with the rising cost of insurance premiums.
‘Like hundreds of other people, the prices of insurance just got so high,’ said Giorgi.
‘We were still trying to recover from the last four years of everything changing after COVID that we thought ‘We’ll recover fast and, then we’ll just pick up our insurance again, and everything will be fine’.’
She added: ‘We never, ever in 100 million years, thought that our house would go up in flames.’
Other residents of the mobile home community have shared similar stories of their lives being upended and their inability to cover insurance costs.
Premiums had been rising fast because of the high probability of a natural disaster in this scenic but fire- and landslide-prone area.
An online fundraiser for the Antinoris says they have not yet received any help from the state or federal government.
The couple evacuated their mobile home park in Pacific Palisades before flames engulfed their property. They are pictured with their second daughter
When they returned to their home, Giorgi and Leo Antinori found there was nothing left but ash
‘Every memory, every piece of physical evidence of her life, is just gone,’ says Giorgi, 37, a music producer
Nothing was left of the blue wooden bungalow where the music producers were raising a family
They say that nothing was left from the rubble of their property, beside the Pacific Coast Highway
All the 200 homes in the mobile home community on Pacific Coast Highway were destroyed
‘We ask all of our friends, family, community, and even strangers to please come together and help in any way that you can,’ says the fundraiser.
‘Your generosity will be not only a financial building block for this new beginning, but an emotional blessing.’
The Palisades Fire is the largest of the wildfires engulfing LA.
It has already burned though is 23,000 and is not yet under control.
At least 24 people have died in what California Gov Gavin Newsom said could be the most devastating natural disaster in US history
The blazes have destroyed thousands of homes, forced 100,000 people to evacuate, and burned an area the size of Washington, DC.
Dangerously high winds were set to return to LA on Monday, jeopardizing efforts to contain two massive wildfires that have leveled whole neighborhoods.
