A blind boy went viral after the L.A. fires. But what happens when the internet moves on?
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- Grayson Roberts, 10, and his family lost their Altadena home in the Eaton fire.
- Roberts’ posts on social media have generated attention for his family’s situation and brought some support.
- Experts say displaced children with disabilities face unique challenges in homes and schools not set up for their needs.
Grayson Roberts is tired of telling this story.
The 10-year-old stood outside the only home he’d ever known — a home he could traverse in total darkness, whose every floorboard and door jamb he knew like the back of his hand.
The last time he’d stood there, the Eaton fire was bearing down on his Altadena neighborhood.
Now, all that remained of the ephemera of his young life was a single, tarnished cymbal from his drum set.
“It was perfectly fine — it still had the same sound,” Grayson said.
In a Reel on his popular Instagram page, he holds the instrument up to his face and strokes its familiar grooves, his eyes closed, listening intently to the sound.
Grayson’s Instagram presence and his appearances on TV and TikTok have drawn outsize attention to the fifth-grader, whose family is one of thousands displaced by the recent fires.
Grayson is blind, the result of a rare genetic disorder that stunts the development of the iris and the crystalline lens covering the eye. He grew up in the limelight of online advocacy, juicing a viral lemonade stand into a trip around the world. With support from his followers and the nonprofit Flight for Sight, he traveled to Ghana and hand-delivered 163 white canes to blind students.
Now, with his bright white smile and sea-glass gray eyes, Grayson has become the picture of wildfire resilience, in his family’s words a “beacon of positivity” amid so much ruin and despair.
But underneath his latest viral turn lies another, darker tale — one about the unique peril disabled Angelenos face in this disaster. Displaced to homes and schools not set up for their needs and with no guarantee of solutions on the horizon, outsize obstacles still lie ahead.
Whether Grayson can overcome them hinges in no small part on his ability to inspire internet strangers with the sunniest possible version of his story, in the hopes their generosity fills the gaps left by public policy and civil rights law.
“It was a normal day,” he began, twirling on the swivel chair in the Monrovia Marriott’s ADA suite where his family was staying 14 days after the fire.
Two weeks earlier, the Sierra Madre Elementary School fifth grader was just getting back from winter break, scraping a waxing Gibbons and a waning crescent out of Oreo frosting in a science unit on the phases of the moon.
He peppered his beloved bus driver, Mr. Mike, with questions on their daily commute. After school, he lost himself in the drums at his weekly music class, before returning to the home he knew so well he could ride his bike in its backyard.
“I’ve worked really hard to provide a stable environment for them, especially for Grayson,” his mother Terica Roberts said. “Because of his disability, it’s always been important for me to have that one safe place.”
She was cooking dinner when Gilbert, her eldest son, came and told her there was a fire outside.
“I’m born and raised in Altadena, we’re used to seeing fires — but smoke off in the distance, not the sky lit up,” Roberts said. “I got a little nervous.”
Anthony Mitchell Sr., an amputee who used a wheelchair, and his son Justin, who had cerebral palsy, died due to slow evacuation efforts during the Altadena fire, relatives said Friday.
She and Gilbert, 20, drove just past North Lake Avenue, where they could see flames. That’s when she started getting texts from a family friend in the fire service.
“Her friend who’s a fire marshal texts her and says, ‘hey, you should start packing up,’” Grayson recalled. “Then he texts us later and says, ‘you have to go right now.’”
Those private warnings began around 7 p.m. Evacuation orders did not go out for their western Altadena neighborhood until hours later, a Times investigation found. Among the 17 confirmed deaths from the fire, all were on the Robertses’ side of North Lake Avenue.
“I was kind of running around trying to grab everything of mine I could,” Grayson said of their panicked escape. “I was scared.”
Left behind were his first white cane, a new Lego model of the Concord he’d just received for Christmas, the green stuffed dog Scout he’d had since he was born.
But also braille books, his adaptive computer and his cobalt blue Light-Touch Perkins Brailler — a nine-key typewriter, not unlike a court reporter’s stenotype machine, that many experts consider essential for a blind child to access literacy.
“Who thinks to grab that when you have 20 minutes to get to the car?” said Rachel Antoine, director of youth services at the Braille Institute.
A braille copy of “James and the Giant Peach” like the one Grayson lost weighs 2½ pounds and costs three times what a paperback does. The Brailler itself weighs 13 pounds, and costs more than $1,000.
Without these supports, experts say, Grayson will be unable to access public education.
The Braille Institute quickly outfitted him with a brailler and a refreshable braille display, which functions like an e-reader. It also got him braille Uno and a stack of his favorite braille paper to draw on.
But he only returned to school Jan. 27, even as other fifth graders were able to attend remotely.
The Eaton and Palisades fires together destroyed at least six schools and close to forty daycare centers. Officials estimate thousands of children are among the newly homeless.
Critics of Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley — a gay woman leading an overwhelmingly male department — call her a “DEI hire” and have questioned her tactics on the morning of the Palisades fire. But to many of her firefighters, she’s already a folk hero.
There are no official estimates of disabled Angelenos who’ve lost their homes, but disabled activists compiled a mutual aid directory of scores of fire victims seeking help, many like the Robertses in urgent need.
Like other families displaced by the fire, the Robertses are torn over whether to stay and rebuild in the community where generations of their family have lived, or start fresh somewhere else.
But unlike many other families, the Robertses must also weigh whether Grayson can continue to get specialized services he needs in the school where he grew up.
“They mentioned that all IEP [Individualized Education Plan] services that they missed will be put into the rest of the school year, but when that happens, just like COVID, I have to stay on top of it to ensure that they’re doing it,” Roberts said. “Half of the time, Grayson will say he hasn’t seen his [teacher of the visually impaired] in a week.”
“Cuz she moved, and they didn’t even tell us!” Grayson cut in.
It’s a struggle that goes back to preschool, when Roberts said she took the Pasadena Unified School District to court over whether Grayson was blind enough to qualify for special education services for students with visual impairments.
Like most blind children, Grayson has some residual vision — that is, some perception of light, shade, shape, color and movement.
Whether such residual vision is sufficient to decode Dr. Seuss and do long division is a separate question — one advocates for the blind and school officials often disagree about.
“Finding the right school is crucial for a visually impaired child,” Antoine said. “We don’t want his family to be stressed working through all the red tape. We don’t want Grayson to fall through the cracks.”
Neither, it seems, does anyone else. As Grayson’s heartwarming interviews race around the internet, donations have poured in. The newly formed LA Stuffy Project found him a replacement for the lost plush puppy, Scout.
But recovering his independence may take Grayson much longer.
“These kids are often sort of sheltered and overprotected in a lot of ways,” said Jay Allen, president of Wayfinder Family Services, which runs programs for blind Californians.
Grayson has already undergone dozens of surgeries, endured five corneal transplants and spent countless hours in the hospital. Now, he’s lost the one place he could bop around as freely and easily as any other 10-year-old.
On Jan. 20, during an interview with Fire Aid, he broke down.
“He started crying [talking] about his memories of the house,” Roberts said. “He’s like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’”
