In a Fire’s Ruins, Signs of a Previous Loss Leave a Family With Seeds of Hope

In Los Angeles County, a sprawling region that has long lacked a center, the fires have connected neighborhoods that otherwise had little binding them. Altadena, a racially diverse, middle-class community in the inland shadow of Pasadena, and Pacific Palisades, with its ocean breezes, sublime views and tear-downs starting in the millions, had little in common until they were both ravaged by the fires.

Justin Carr might have grown to be another link.

Earlier generations of his family had been part of a wave of Black people who moved from the South to California, where many settled in the Los Angeles area seeking better jobs and a better life. Mr. Carr’s father had grown up alongside Jackie Robinson in Pasadena. Mrs. Toler Carr’s father, Burl Toler, became the N.F.L.’s first Black referee in 1965. When Justin was a year old, his grandmother looked into his calm, inquisitive eyes and observed: “Oooh, this boy has been here before.”

Justin attended Harvard-Westlake, an exclusive private school with a small population of Black students. In a poem that he wrote for a class and that his parents were presented with after he died, Justin wrote that walking down white halls with white walls, “with kinks in my hair and the dark skin I wear,” left him feeling like a fly in a bowl of milk. He made sure to sit in the front row in class, he wrote, because “it’s hard for me to imagine being stationed in the back, just like my mother and father were, where they couldn’t even see that they were lacking opportunity.”

On the daily bus ride to Harvard-Westlake, 20 miles to the west, Justin struck up a friendship with another Black student, a baseball player. After the baseball team attended Justin’s memorial service, which drew close to 2,000 people, his friend pitched a no-hitter that very afternoon. He told a reporter that he had been thinking of Justin when he took the mound. (Last fall, Justin’s old friend, Jack Flaherty, helped pitch the Los Angeles Dodgers to a World Series championship.)