Gator

My heart breaks. We are know in the age where information abounds...I guess this is a good thing? I'd ask you to remember a Gator today...

LA CONCHITA, Calif. (AP) - Jimmie Wallet went out for ice cream, and when he got back, everyone and everything he had left behind were gone. On Wednesday, he identified the bodies of his wife and three of his daughters, pulled from a tangle of homes smashed by a mudslide.

No one lost more than Wallet in Monday's mudslide, which has killed at least 10 people in this oceanside community. And, driven by the frantic hope of finding his family, no one was as quick to claw through the debris and help pull out survivors.

Wallet dug for hours in the rain around where he thought the family might be. He helped rescue two people before he stopped and waited, smoking cigarettes as friends stopped by to embrace him. Early Wednesday, after 36 hours, his wait ended.

His wife, Mechelle, was the first to be found. Around 2 a.m., firefighters and several of Wallet's friends carried her to the makeshift morgue at the town's gas station. Wallet went in and identified her, then returned to the porch of a peach stucco house where he had been staying, put up his feet and sat without a word.

Two hours later, his youngest daughter, 2-year-old Paloma, was taken out on a stretcher. Her sister Raven, 6, was next, soon followed by 10-year-old Hannah.

The three girls were found next to each other, apparently sitting on a couch when the slide broke apart their house, pushing it for about 100 yards and covering it in muck.

"They never had a chance to get out," said Scott Hall, a battalion chief with Ventura County Fire Department.

His fourth daughter, a 16-year-old, had been in nearby Ventura when the slide happened.

As workers searched for the missing in La Conchita, Wallet said in interviews with The Associated Press that he moved to this oceanside town 70 miles northwest of Los Angeles from Ventura in search of an easier life.

Wallet said they played music and hung out on an old bus with a rooftop patio. Engraved over the home's front gate were the words "Music is love."

Residents of La Conchita said Wallet sang with his kids, took them to the beach and walked around town with Hannah on his shoulders. His wife stayed home with the children and was "powerful, such a rock," said Vera Long, who lived three houses down.

"They were incredibly beautiful children. They had these sparkling, intelligent, deeply soulful eyes. Just incredibly loving," Long said. "The only comfort I can derive is that they were all together."

May it be that Music breathes peace into Gator's life...