A drop aircraft for four years, 69-year-old Arthur Simoneau was a determined risk-taker. And thus, as people fled the Pacific Palisades fireplace Tuesday, Simoneau headed closer to the fire.
According to Steve Murillo, a long-time friend and fellow hang glider, “he was returning from a skiing vacation in Mammoth when he learned of the removal requests for his Topanga house in the Santa Monica Mountains.”
Simoneau kept going.
Murillo, who spoke with Simoneau on Tuesday evening as his companion drove back toward Topanga, said,” He was heading home if he could.” ” Arthur was the kind of man that when he put his mind to anything, you don’t really communicate him out of stuff”.
Which streets were opened and which were closed, Murillo texted his companion. He always received a response via words.
On Thursday, authorities found Simoneau’s figure, another terrible cut in a mounting dying toll fueled by one of the worst fire in the country’s history. As of Saturday evening, Los Angeles County had reported 16 murders.
According to Murillo, Simoneau was discovered close to the doorway to his residence, evidently trying to defend it.
Friends and neighbors claim that Simoneau represented Topanga, a tight-knit hippy rock community known for welcoming the rebellious.
He was soft-spoken and colorful, his long gold hair kept in a hairstyle. Every trip was an opportunity to hang-glide. Back in the day, he also did it outdoors. Therefore he switched to shoes.
” He was a denizen of Topanga. He work in good”, said Malury Silberman, a companion who met him through the Sylmar Hang Gliding Assn. ” Kind of a grown-up bohemian — not a terrible word out of the guy”.
Susan Dumond, the neighborhood’s official street vendor, claimed that Susan knew him as the unofficial resident of Swenson Drive. In the first 1990s, he was one of the first to cross the treacherous route. He had repair it with his own money for years afterward. He had a smiles and a peace sign for all of his companions and was known to leave a trail of newly yanked aggressive species behind him wherever he went.
Because there were plants all over the road, Dumond, who resides a dozen houses apart, “always made me realize that he had been on the street.”
Dumond’s vehicle door was slammed shut on Tuesday night due to the strong winds and dust that had accumulated. She left on Thursday to find her husband’s medical supplies.
As she left around 4: 30 p. m., she saw a sheriff’s deputy outside Simoneau’s house.
” That’s his nature is to protect the community, protect his home. I would think that’s what he did”, said Dumond. He was deeply concerned about the neighborhood and would do anything to assist it.
That area, centered on a stormy street inside a fire-prone valley, is no stranger to devastating fire. A month after Simoneau built the house in 1992, a wildfire , raced across the city, claiming 350 houses and three life.
Jim Wiley, the village plumber , who grew up in the area, remembers talking with Simoneau in the aftereffects of the 1993 incident. Like Wiley, Simoneau had chosen not to leave and had informed Wiley that it was a good thing he hadn’t since he had been able to remove the embers that had started to linger inside a dim bathroom window as a result.
” If the person wasn’t there to throw it out, it would have burned down negative”, said Wiley.
This period, the fire proved too severe. After a fire broke out through the metal beams and drew them along, a blackened brick grain of a house was all that remained on Thursday. The only items that could be identified within were three burned vehicles and a few motorcycles.
Simoneau’s child Andre wrote on a , GoFundMe page , that he always knew his father— who he said rode motorcycles at” Social Security” time with a hat that said” for innovation use only” — “wouldn’t perish of old age or disease”.
He wrote,” It was always in our minds that he would pass away in the most spectacular Arthur manner.” ” Unfortunately, he died in the Palisades fire protecting his house]and ] doing what he did best: being a badass and doing something only he was brave enough ( or crazy enough ) to do”.
His brother didn’t listen to an inquiry from The Times.
Although Simoneau’s main passion was a difficult one, many nearby hang gliders claimed he was fearless and was cautious in the sky.
He was often a very optimistic person, his friend of 40 years, Gary Mell, who questioned whether Simoneau’s inability to have home insurance may have caused him to stay for very long. ” If he had plan, Arthur’s very smart of a person to do something like that”.
The hang-gliding earth, his companions said, had lost one of its explorers.
Kia Ravanfar, 40, claimed that the majority of the old-timers who participated in hang gliding at the time when it was more common to design their own wings from hardware stores had both passed away or had stopped.
Simoneau was one of the few people to accomplish both.
” He didn’t live a life like he was aged”, said Ravanfar, who said Simoneau had just been flying in Owens Valley, which is to hang floating as Mavericks is to riding. ” I often had imagined that he’d been hang gliding until he don’t walk”.
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