PASADENA, Calif. — In the aftermath of the January wildfires in Southern California, many residents returned to their properties to find little left but ash and debris. Among them was Derek Russell Jr., who had just buried his father — a retired police officer and Army veteran — a month before the Eaton Fire consumed his home.
As Russell searched through the rubble, he focused on one deeply personal mission: recovering his father’s police badge. It was one of only two keepsakes he hoped to find, the other being the folded American flag presented to him at his father’s funeral. The flag had already been found. The badge, he feared, was lost for good.
That changed during a chance encounter with Col. Sonny Avichal, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Emergency Recovery Office – Eaton. Avichal’s team had just received approval to begin clearing debris at multifamily residences, including Russell’s.
“Derek was explaining to me that his dad was a cop, and then he asked, ‘Are you guys going to be cleaning that place up?’” Avichal said. “I said, ‘Yeah, actually, we’re going to start next week.’”
The following day, Avichal contacted Will McGowan, a team lead with ECC, the Corps’ debris removal contractor, and explained the situation. McGowan relayed the request to his crew, and one of the workers offered a confident response: “Don’t worry about it. By the end of today, we’re going to find your badge.”
They did, within the hour.
“The guy found the badge and gave it to Will. Will gave it to me, and I gave it back to Derek,” Avichal said. “For that chance meeting and their schedule being just right, it was a lot of things that aligned.”
Russell was stunned when the call came in.
“My first initial reaction was shock,” he said. “I literally had no words because, up to that point, I thought it was a lost cause. I didn’t think that it was going be able to be recovered.”
He was driving on the freeway at the time and struggled to keep his emotions in check.
“I couldn’t break down and cry,” he said. “Probably that’s what I felt like I wanted to do.”
To Russell, the recovery felt almost spiritual, as though his father was watching over him.
“It was a needle in a haystack,” Russell said. “To find this, amid all that debris … it was my dad looking down. He helped them find it, for sure.”
The badge, though charred, was still intact. But its condition didn’t matter. What mattered was what it stood for.
“It literally tells a story of survival,” Russell said. “Despite the condition of the badge, it survived the fire — like me. I survived the fire.”
Russell said the badge became a symbol of endurance and survival for him and his community.
“Up until the fire, my home was a safe place,” he said. “Everything in that home was safe until the fire came and took the safe place away. That badge means everything to me. It means survival. I’m a survivor, and that badge is a survivor. My community are survivors.”
Avichal credited the ECC crew with going above and beyond.
“All I did was just make the connection between Will and Derek,” he said. “They get a lot of requests, and a lot of it is outside scope — but they definitely took the time to make sure that they talked to their crew and made all these different connections to show that, at the end of the day, it’s the care that we give the public. It’s about the survivor.”
Russell said he’s not sure what comes next, but he’s keeping his head up.
“I’m so grateful for meeting Sonny when I met him because he fit the pieces into the puzzle and connected me with these people and got the job done,” Russell said.
He also praised USACE for the larger mission they’re carrying out in Altadena.
“They’re doing an amazing job up there with the cleanup,” he said. “The cleanup is the beginning of the process of rebuilding. Without the cleanup, there’s no rebuilding. We are very thankful for the Army Corps of Engineers.”