A year after the Palisades fire, she’s stayed behind, because leaving would abandon her son’s spirit
For more than 330 days, Shelley Sykes has lived inside a greenhouse on her 17-acre Malibu property, bathing with bottled water and relying on friends and utility workers for basic necessities.
There is still no permanent water or power. Permits to rebuild her main house remain stalled. Yet every morning, she wakes up on the land where her son died because leaving, she says, would mean abandoning his spirit.
Sykes lost her son, Rory Sykes, during the Palisades fire that tore through Carbon Canyon, destroying her main house, a television studio, and three cottages.
Rory was 32, lived with cerebral palsy, 6-foot-5 inches tall, weighing more than 250 pounds. When the fire approached, his feet were too swollen to walk. He refused to leave his cottage, convinced they were safe because the property sat just 150 yards from the fire station.
“He said, ‘Mom, they won’t let us burn. We’re next to the fire department,’” Sykes recalled.
When embers began landing on the roof, Sykes tried to call 911. There was no signal. The power was already out. She manually forced open her double garage door bringing her peacocks and drove to the local fire station for help. She was told there was no water in the tanks or the hydrants.
She says she had watched the water company shut off supply earlier that morning.
When firefighters finally returned with her to the property, three cottages had been reduced to ash and twisted metal in just 45 minutes. Rory’s cottage was gone entirely. Later, detectives and CSI would tell her that her son died from carbon monoxide poisoning before flames reached him.
“There was nothing left to identify,” she said. “No bed. No walls. Even the tiles were pulverized into dust.”
Sykes describes several details she believes point to deeply troubling circumstances surrounding the fire.
She recalls white clouds being sprayed in the area a week earlier that caused residents to cough. She noticed small, isolated fires burning beneath electrical poles, and she says water was shut off during an active emergency.
“It was not normal,” she said. “Three cottages gone in 45 minutes, trees still standing.”
Investigators have not publicly confirmed those suspicions, but for Sykes, the unanswered questions compound her grief.
Insurance had already pulled out of the area after the Woolsey Fire in 2018. The family was left with coverage through the California FAIR Plan, which did not protect the contents of the structures. Today, her mortgage company pressures her to rebuild, yet Los Angeles County permits remain largely frozen. Of dozens of destroyed homes in the area, only a handful of residents have stayed behind. Sykes is one of them.
On Wednesday, a memorial service at American Legion Post 283 honored Rory’s life as one of the 12 families who lost a loved one in the fire.
Though Australian by birth, Rory loved America – its technology, the speed of its internet, the scale of its ideas. He was an Apple beta tester, a computer consultant who built his world online when his body limited his movement.
Sykes expected an Australian flag. Instead, U.S. veterans folded and presented an American flag.
“My son would have loved this,” she said upon receiving the flag. “That flag meant everything.”
Native American and Hawaiian singers from GEM Global Empowerment Mission performed songs about spirits that never die in Village Green. For Sykes, it was confirmation of what she already believes that energy carries on, that families remain connected across realms.
She believes Rory is no longer disabled and is proud of her.
Two days before Christmas, a sleek glass-walled tiny home – an “Apple Pod,” exactly what Rory had once dreamed of – arrived on her property. She placed some of his ashes beneath it. The rest rest under a phoenix sculpture that arrived just days later, symbolizing rebirth.
“Even though it took a year,” she said, “the timing feels perfect.”
In time, Sykes plans not only to rebuild but to transform the land into what she calls a “happy home” for children with special needs after she is gone.
Shelley and Rory co-founded Happy Charity in 2005, dedicated to supporting families with special-needs children and ensuring that 100 percent of funds raised go directly to those in need. Since the fire, the mission has expanded to distributing sleeping bags, tents, backpacks, baby wipes, and shoes to unhoused residents across Los Angeles.
“Now I understand what it means to live without shelter,” she said.
One year after the fire, Shelley Sykes remains without utilities, without a finished home, but with unwavering purpose. Rory’s legacy, she says, lives not only in memory, but in action.
“We keep living on, and so does he.”
Michelle Edgar is a correspondent for the Southern California News Group.