2 former Chicago journalists lose home in Los Angeles wildfires: 'Fire lighting up the sky'

Liz Nagy Image
Monday, January 13, 2025
Former Chicago journalists lose home in California wildfires
Former Chicago journalists Becky Schlikerman and Kim Janssen lost their Altadena home in the Los Angeles-area wildfires in Southern California.

LOS ANGELES (WLS) -- The wildfires in Southern California continue to impact families with ties to Chicago.

ABC7 Chicago's Liz Nagy is in California and spoke with two former Chicago journalists whose home was destroyed in the fires.

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First came the hurricane force winds that sent a tree crashing through Becky Schlickerman and her husband Kim Janssen's Altadena home Tuesday afternoon.

Schlikerman, a former Chicago journalist and Cook County employee had just stepped out of her home office.

"Where I'd actually been working less than a minute before," Schlickerman said. "You could see out into the sky."

As it turns out that damage would only matter for a few hours. By 8 p.m. Tuesday night, evacuation orders blared.

"Cleaning up in the evening when we noticed the fire lighting up the sky in the ridge behind us," Schlickerman said.

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Schlikerman snapped a photo as the couple and her mom packed up. It was the very last picture they ever had from their mountainside home.

"I was literally vacuuming, and I turned to my wife and was like, 'how's this for futile gesture?'" Janssen said. "We knew that the house might go... vacuuming in a house that you know might not be there the next morning."

At that point, there was no way to know, and chores still seemed sort of necessary.

"I ran the dishwasher before I ran out because I didn't want to have smelly dishes when I came back," Schlikerman said.

They came back to a mountainside paradise incinerated by the Eaton Fire, and with it, some of their most precious possessions.

"My grandfather was a refugee from the holocaust," Schlikerman said. "I lost all his documents and historic papers that I had in there."

SEE ALSO | Chicago restaurants raise money for Southern California wildfire relief

"My mother passed last year and she made us, for our first time in Chicago, she made us this beautiful book of family recipes and hand wrote it and bound it," Janssen said. "And I did grab that. It's one of my most treasured possessions."

ABC7 Chicago returned with them to the site of the home Sunday afternoon. It was an almost unrecognizable pile of ash.

As it happens, Schlikerman spent her 40th birthday stepping on almost everything they had, alongside her husband, who is also a former Chicago journalist. After they left Chicago in 2019, it had been their personal paradise for the last few years.

People have frequently compared this destruction to that of a war zone. That's because if you look around, it's a fair comparison. But Schlikerman's mom knows what that looks like. The Altadena home was supposed to be her safe refuge after she left Israel for good nearly a year ago.

"She's struggling to be honest," Schlikerman said. "She's 70, fled her home in Israel and now lost her home here. She's struggling."

The couple had plans to be on a beach in Mexico to celebrate Schlikerman's birthday, not picking through what they don't have left.

"Our mailbox is still here," Schlikerman said. "There's stuff there if you open it."

With the help of dear friends and former colleagues in Chicago, they're getting by.

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