Los Angeles – Grayson Roberts is tired of telling this story.
The 10 -year -old was out of the only house he had met: a house that could cross in total darkness, whose floors and door jamb knew as the back of his hand.
The last time he stayed there, Eaton’s fire was demolishing his neighborhood of Altadena.
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Now, everything that remained of the ephemeral of his young life was a fogged dish of his battery.
“I was perfectly fine, I still had the same sound,” said Grayson.
On a reel on his popular Instagram page, he holds the instrument on his face and caresses his family slots, his eyes closed, listening carefully to the sound.
The presence of Grayson’s Instagram and its appearances on television and Tiktok have drawn attention to the fifth grade student, whose family is one of the thousands displaced by recent fires.
Grayson is blind, the result of a rare genetic disorder that proves the development of iris and the crystalline lens that covers the eye. He grew up at the online defense care center, judging a viral lemonade post on a trip around the world. With the support of his followers and the non -profit flight for the view, he traveled to Ghana and delivered 163 white canes to blind students.
Now, with his brilliant white smile and his gray marine glass eyes, Grayson has become the image of forest fire resistance, in the words of his family a “positivity lighthouse” in the midst of so much ruin and despair.
But below his last viral turn is another darker story, one about the angelen of unique danger with disabilities in this disaster. Displaced to houses and schools that are not established for their needs and without guarantee of solutions on the horizon, obstacles break down that they are still ahead.
Whether Grayson can overcome them largely in their ability to inspire Internet strangers with the most possible version of their history, hoping that their generosity will fill out the gaps left by public policies and civil rights law .
“It was a normal day,” he began, turning in the rotating chair in the Suite Ada of Monrovia Marriott where his family stayed 14 days after the fire.
Two weeks earlier, the fifth grade student of Sierra Madre Elementary School was returning from the winter holidays, scraping a hair removal gibbons and a waning crescent of Oreo glaze in a scientific unit in the phases of the moon.
He splashed his beloved bus driver, Mr. Mike, with questions about his daily trip. After school, he lost in the battery in his weekly music class, before returning to the house that he knew so well that he could mount his bicycle on his backyard.
“I have worked very hard to provide them with a stable atmosphere, especially for Grayson,” said his mother Terica Roberts. “Due to its disability, it has always been important for me to have that safe place.”
He was cooking dinner when Gilbert, his eldest son, came and told him that there was a fire outside.
“I was born and grew up in Altadena, we are used to seeing fires, but smoking in the distance, not the illuminated sky,” Roberts said. “I got a little nervous.”
She and Gilbert, 20, led just going through North Lake Avenue, where they could see flames. It was then that he began receiving text messages from a family friend in the Fire Service.
“Her friend who is a fire chief sends her text messages and says: ‘Hey, you should start packing,” Grayson recalled. “Then he sends us a text message later and says: ‘You have to go right now.'”
These private warnings began around 7 in the afternoon, the evacuation orders did not leave for their western neighborhood of Altadena until hours later, according to an investigation of the Times. Among the 17 deaths confirmed by the fire, all were on the side of Robertses by North Lake Avenue.
“I was running trying to grab everything I could,” Grayson said about his panic escape. “I was scared.”
There were his first white cane, a new Lego model of the concord that he had just received for Christmas, the green teddy dog explorer that he had since he was born.
But also Braille Books, its adaptive computer and its Perkins Blue Light-Touch Blue Light, a nine-key typewriter, not very different from the stenotype machine of a court’s reporter, which many experts consider A blind child access literacy.
“Who thinks will grab that when you have 20 minutes to get to the car?” Rachel Antoine, director of Youth Services at the Braille Institute, said.
A copy of Braille of “James and The Giant Peach” like the one Grayson lost 2½ pounds and costs three times what a pocket book does. The brain itself weighs 13 pounds and costs more than $ 1,000.
Without these supports, experts say, Grayson will not be able to access public education.
The Braille Institute quickly equipped it with a brain and a refreshing Braille screen, which functions as an electronic reader. Braille also got one and a battery of his favorite Braille role to draw.
But he only returned to school on January 27, even when other fifth grade students could attend remotely.
The fires of Eaton and Palisades destroyed at least six schools and about forty nursery centers. Officials estimate that thousands of children are among homeless.
There are no official estimates of Angels with disabilities that have lost their homes, but disability activists compiled a directory of mutual aid of dozens of fire victims that seek help, many like Robertses in urgent need.
Like other families displaced by the fire, Robertses are torn in case staying and rebuilding in the community where their family generations have lived or start again elsewhere.
But unlike many other families, Robertses must also weigh if Grayson can continue to receive specialized services that he needs in the school where he grew up.
“They mentioned that all IEP services (individualized education program) that were lost will be put in the rest of the school year, but when that happens, just like Covid, I have to be aware to make sure they are doing that,” he said Roberts “Half of the time, Grayson will say that he has not seen his (master of visual disabled) in a week.”
“Because she moved, and they didn’t even tell us!” Grayson cut.
It is a fight that dates back to preschool, when Roberts said he took the Unified School District of Pasadena to court on whether Grayson was blind enough to qualify for special education services for students with visual disabilities.
Like most blind children, Grayson has some residual vision, that is, some perception of light, shadow, shape, color and movement.
If this residual vision is sufficient to decode Dr. Seuss and making a long division is a separate question: one defends by the blind and school officials often disagree.
“Finding the right school is crucial for a child with visual disabilities,” said Antoine. “We do not want your family to stress working throughout the bureaucracy. We do not want Grayson to fall through the cracks. “
It seems that either, nobody else. While the moving Grayson interviews run on the Internet, donations have arrived.
But recovering your independence can lead to Grayson much longer.
“These children are often protected and overprotected in many ways,” said Jay Allen, president of Wayfinder Family Services, who directs programs for blind Californians.
Grayson has already suffered dozens of surgeries, suffered five corneal transplants and spent countless hours in the hospital. Now, he has lost the only place where he could attack as freely and easily as any other 10 -year -old boy.
On January 20, during an interview with Fire Aid, he broke.
“He started crying (talking) about his house memories,” Roberts said. “He says: ‘I don’t want to talk about that.'”
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