Scenes of Santa Rosa Police evacuating residents — excerpted from almost eight hours of body camera footage obtained exclusively by this news agency — show the chaotic early moments of last year’s Wine Country fires. Warning: The video contains graphic language.

Hours of “body cam” footage obtained exclusively by the Bay Area News Group tell a frantic, inspiring story of the bravery, compassion and teamwork the night of Oct. 8 and early Oct. 9. But they also reveal, in shake-you-to-the-core detail, some surprising reasons so many people were left behind — and the seemingly simple lessons Californians can take away as we prepare for another fire season.

“Sir, I’m scared,” an elderly widow told Officer Dave Pedersen, one of the many voices recorded that night.

Without realizing it, Santa Rosa police officers captured the horror and heroism of one of California’s deadliest wildfires from the tiny cameras clipped to their chests.

You don’t see the officers’ faces, but you hear their voices — sometimes stern, sometimes soothing — as they lift the frail and elderly from wheelchairs into patrol cars, heave up garage doors stuck when the power goes out, and calm stunned homeowners as their houses burn behind them.

HE IMAGES jolt up and down as police officers run door-to-door, panting through thick, swirling smoke, imploring people to flee.

They also reveal unguarded moments of tenderness amid the chaos. When Officer Orlando Macias guides an elderly woman in a sky blue bathrobe with pink embroidered flowers onto an evacuation bus, he tells her, “Grab onto my shoulders, like we’re dancing, OK?”

There is something raw and ruthless about the body camera images that chronicle this heartbreak: They catch homeowners with garden hoses refusing to leave. They show the exhaustion and frustration of police officers yelling at able-bodied evacuees, like a man shooting a video with his phone as the fire closes in. “The fire is coming right here. Evacuate! What is wrong with you! What the f— is wrong with you! Do you see what is happening?”

The wind-driven blaze moved 12 miles in about four hours — from Calistoga into the heart of Santa Rosa — too quick and too late for everyone to be saved. But many residents encountered needless risk — and some succumbed to it: 44 people died in the Wine Country fires. At least five were found trapped behind electric garage doors when the power went out; people were either too weak to lift them or didn’t know how to open them manually. And at a luxury retirement community on a hilltop in the Fountaingrove neighborhood, about a quarter of the 416 residents were still in their rooms or asleep — with two buildings catching fire and no staff in sight — when police arrived to rescue them.

Police video shows Coffey Park resident Ken Mazzoni resisting an officer’s pleas to evacuate. Mazzoni and his wife recently watched the footage together with the officer in an emotional reunion.

They inform dispatchers that the Mazzonis won’t budge, then head off to the next rescue. But 20 minutes later, as a wall of flames approached down the block, Diaz returned to Hopper Avenue to check on the couple. Thankfully, they were getting into their car to leave.

“Sir, you’re gonna put a lot of people in danger,” says Officer Diaz, his image captured by Adams’ camera. “Sir, please, we need to get you out of here.”

It’s 2:42 a.m. in Coffey Park. Smoke is billowing. Embers are flying and Mazzoni is sitting on the front bench with a hose in his hand. Two cops tell him it’s time to leave. He refuses.

The Mazzonis know better now. But that night, as his own porch light illuminated him for the body camera, Ken Mazzoni was defiant.

Together, we watched the most dramatic and treacherous moments of their lives. What did they learn? What would they do differently? Could they even bear to relive that night?

With summer approaching — and winds in Santa Rosa already triggering red flag warnings — we sat down with officers who wore the body cams that night as well as with some of the people they rescued. The videos looked so vivid, Officer Chris Diaz said, “I smelled the smoke again.”

In nearly every frame, you see embers blowing sideways through the glowing orange sky. Through the body cameras’ microphones, you hear the constant buffeting of the wind that propels the flames while drowning out sirens and screams.

Coffey Park: Slide up and down to see before and after the fire.

Just before they all leave the Mazzonis’ empty lot and hug one more time, the officer who lost his family home and nearly lost his temper that night with Ken Mazzoni had to ask: Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

She brought along a fire-singed letter that the firestorm had somehow blown off her kitchen table. It had sailed more than six miles west before landing in an apple tree near Sebastopol. Branded with ember holes, the letter was nothing more than a renewal notice from the AARP. Even so, the property owners plucked it from the branches and sent it back to the Mazzonis’ address on Hopper Avenue. It included a note: “We hope and pray that you have been able to start life over and see new beginnings every day.”

Nancy Mazzoni, 62, still visits their corner lot three times a day, watering plants, pulling weeds and searching for her missing cat Spicey. In a gold locket around her neck, she wears the ashes of her other cat Precious, whose remains they found in the ruins of their home.

“I had seen what was coming,” Diaz explained. “And I had the luxury of knowing that.”

But Diaz knew. The officer had already helped his own family a few blocks away escape through a tunnel of flames that consumed his home.

“I was in disbelief. Where’s the fire trucks? I had no idea it was that bad. I had no idea the fire was so close,” Mazzoni, 64, said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He didn’t know the fire had jumped six lanes of Highway 101. The power was still on in their house, they received no notification of mandatory evacuations and they hadn’t spotted a single firetruck.

The Mazzonis are still hopeful to find their missing cat Spicey.

Santa Rosa Police Officer Chris Diaz, center, greets Nancy Mazzoni, 62, right, and her husband Ken, 64, left, after reuniting at the site of the couple’s destroyed home in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. During the Wine Country wildfires, Diaz warned the Mazzonis to leave their house as the fires swept towards them.

Then Mazzoni shakes his head. He had no idea how bad things really were.

“Wow, what an asshole I am,” Ken Mazzoni said, as the three of them watched the video. "Sorry."

Last weekend, the Mazzonis returned to the vacant lot where they plan to rebuild a house identical to the one they lost. Diaz came, too. It had been seven months since they had seen each other. They hugged and cried.

Santa Rosa Police Officer Casey Miller wrote about one elderly man whom Cal Fire had to drag to safety. He was covered with ash, smoke coming off his body, still resisting his rescue.

The body cam footage and hundreds of pages of police reports and 911 calls indicate that dozens of residents refused to leave the path of the massive fires that night, even when the flames were consuming their homes.

As incredible as it seems, Ken Mazzoni’s stubborn insistence on staying that night is actually a typical response. Disasters, particularly those with little warning, can rattle practical and logical people. Studies show that using the word “mandatory” can motivate people to leave, but factors like pets, age and lack of information can lead to stubborn citizens in dire predicaments.

Wow, what an asshole I am. … I had no idea it was that bad.

Kathleen Connelly, 75, shows off her new garage door in the Oakmont neighborhood. It has a back-up battery and lighter construction that allows her to open it manually if necessary. On the first morning of the Wine Country wildfires, she could not get her car out of her garage to evacuate.

Connelly, whose home was spared, just had one installed last week.

Both women believe that the deaths of five people trapped in garages that night could have been prevented. So does state Sen. Bill Dodd, who lives in Napa and who couldn’t lift his own heavy wooden garage door during the Atlas fire that same night, either. He has introduced Senate Bill 969 requiring newly sold or installed garage door motors to be equipped with backup batteries.

“I tried several times and couldn’t get it open and I was saying, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do now?’ ” she said.

Diehm, who has walked with a cane for 20 years, had trouble, too.

“I’m a little old lady now and I can’t do it anymore,” said Connelly, 75. She knew to pull the emergency handle, she said in a recent interview, but couldn’t lift the garage door. “My God, that door was really heavy.”

In nearby Oakmont, neighbors Kathleen Connelly and Cheryl Diehm remember hailing down passersby to help get their cars out, too.

As the fire’s aftermath would show, some residents frantically floored their accelerators in reverse in attempts to ram through their garage doors. At least one car was found incinerated, Pedersen said, with the remains of the buckled garage door on top.

Body camera footage shows Santa Rosa Police Officer Dave Pedersen rescuing four people fleeing the fire on foot. One frantic woman explains how she couldn’t get her car out of her garage because the power went out.

“I looked down the complex and there was a lot of doors,” Pedersen said in an interview last weekend. “A lot of doors.”

He directs her down the hill, then heads to the next garage and then on to the next. For 20 minutes, as flames encircle the neighborhood and the contacts in Pedersen’s eyes feel like sandpaper, he opens at least five more.

Then, for just a moment, the woman’s strained face comes into focus. The camera catches her looking up at him, desperately: “I don’t know where to go.”

“This is a very, this is a very distressing event,” Pedersen says. After figuring that her model of door requires a tubular key and getting it from her key ring, he calmly opens the garage. “There you go ma’am, you are outta here.”

When she settles into the passenger seat, she begins to cry.

In the encounter with the widow, you see Pedersen slowing his patrol car and telling her to “hop in.”

Police body camera footage shows many elderly residents couldn't open their garage doors when the power went out.

Throughout the night, body cam microphones crackle with the voices of dispatchers calling out addresses of people stuck in garages, and the rumble of the doors as officers wrench them open.

The heart-breaking and chaotic exchange would become an all-too-common problem that night: Many either didn’t realize the doors have manual overrides or were too elderly or weak to grasp the release handle or find the special key and heave up the heavy panel doors. Maybe with no power or light, they couldn’t find the handle.

“I need help,” says one woman, her voice picked up on Officer Pedersen’s microphone. She flagged him down in front of a smoke-filled condominium complex on Stonefield Lane, in the hillside Fountaingrove district. “I’m a widow. My husband’s gone. I can’t get the garage door open.”

But for those trying to escape the Wine Country fires when the power went out, many found themselves stranded. That’s when panic set in, all caught on camera.

When contemplating evacuation from a fire, most people think of grabbing their pets, their important papers and scrapbooks and stuffing them into their cars before fleeing. Few think about whether their garage doors will open.

Support local journalism Your subscription strengthens journalism in the Bay Area. Subscribe today for more news that matters.

‍ Lesson Three: Make sure your care home has an evacuation plan “So many things that went wrong here”

Karl mondon/Bay Area News Group Irene Lopez's wheelchair sits at the end of a driveway in an apocalyptic scene on Keoke Court in the incinerated Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. The story of the wheelchair rescue became clearer with police body camera video.

Lifting garage doors was only one of Officer Pedersen’s jobs that night. His next was kicking in doors at the Varenna retirement community: first, forward, like cops do in the movies; then with backward donkey kicks. A battering ram and crowbar came next. The power was out. He had no master key for what seemed like forever. And there wasn’t a staff member in sight. Other officers joined him there, including Macias and Eric St. Germain. Adams and Sgt. Steven Pehlke joined them after first evacuating Varenna’s Villa Capris memory care building next door that burned to the ground. The other buildings at Varenna on Fountaingrove Parkway survived, some with fire damage. They still look like Italian resorts, replete with a golf course and swimming pools and tiered fountains, chauffeur service, yoga classes and $80 facials. Who would believe that 100 residents could have been left behind? “I love the employees of this place,” Pedersen is heard quipping in one smoky hallway in the midst of pulling residents out of their apartments. “Yeah, don’t send your loved ones here,” says another officer. How could this happen? And could it happen to you or your parents — whether at a small care home in a bustling subdivision or resort-like complex at the top of a hill? “There’s so many things that went wrong here and so many things that need to change,” said Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform who was very familiar with what happened at Varenna. “What kind of plan did they have? What kind of training did the staff have? Were there back-up generators?”

Footage shows police officers and firefighters at the Varenna retirement community, where they kicked in doors and used battering rams and crowbars to rescue elderly residents who had been left alone as the fire approached.

The Oakmont Management Group, which operates the complex, insists “we did not abandon our residents.” After receiving body cam footage shared by this news organization, Oakmont spokeswoman Crystal Robinson said in an emailed statement that employees began voluntary evacuations after they couldn’t get through the clogged 911 lines, even though they had no official evacuation orders. “In addition to company vehicles, multiple employees used their personal vehicles to transport residents to an evacuation site outside the disaster area,” the statement said. “Emergency authorities at several entry locations refused to let our staff return.” Unable to get through, the statement said, the employees were assured that the authorities would take responsibility for the rest of the evacuation.

The chaotic 11 hours of Santa Rosa Police Officer Dave Pedersen's shift are detailed in the police report he filed from that night.

But others say that’s no excuse and that relatives were able to drive up Fountaingrove Parkway that night. Some residents have filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming they were left to “die alone.” The state Department of Social Services, which oversees licensed care groups, has an open investigation into the evacuation process at the Oakmont facilities that night. When law enforcement officers arrived, they were surprised how many residents were left to fend for themselves, helped only by a few relatives who had rushed to their aid. Pedersen also found Bob Mitton, a 73-year-old retired forester from Canada, among a group of residents waiting in the lobby. “Do you work here?” Pedersen asked him. “No, I live here,” Mitton said. “Do you know where the people are? Show us,” Mitton remembers Pedersen asking him. Over the next couple of hours, they ran door-to-door, floor-to-floor, through three buildings. Pedersen deputized Mitton on the spot and told him to announce “Santa Rosa Police” as he barged into each room. “It was quite a long night, I tell you,” Mitton said. The videos go dark when police enter someone’s private home or room, and those scenes are redacted from the public records. But Mitton says he gathered residents’ hearing aids and walkers and bathrobes and encouraged them to put on shoes, not slippers, to walk across the courtyard covered in burning embers. “It seriously felt like it was the Poseidon Adventure movie,” Pedersen said, “where the boat turns upside down and all the passengers are trying to save their own lives.”

Amid poignant interactions, dozens of elderly Varenna residents were loaded onto buses by Santa Rosa police officers to escape the fire.

In the body cam footage, about the only obvious signs of an evacuation plan that night were the EXIT lights that glowed green through the thick smoke. At one point, officers broke into a “safety closet” filled with bottled water and grabbed flashlights to replace their fading ones. Mitton guided them to the manager’s office where they busted through the door and tried to decide which on a wall of keys was a master. Throughout the ordeal, Pedersen says he kept asking his dispatchers to send buses, but when two hours passed he worried they were never coming, that there was no way to get 100 people down the hill and through the fire. It was just before dawn when the two buses finally arrived. Officers helped the senior citizens in their nightgowns and pajamas up the steep stairs. “Atta girl,” says Officer Macias, as he lifts a woman wrapped in a red blanket into the bus. Then, to lighten the mood as he surveys the bus loaded with senior citizens, adds, “We’re going wine tasting in two hours.” After seven months of repairs to their fire and smoke-ravaged apartment, Mitton and his wife just moved back last weekend to Varenna. Firefighters had punched a hole in their floor when the apartment below caught fire. Not many residents know it was Mitton dragging them out of bed. Many didn’t have time to find their glasses. At the end of the night, Pedersen remembers stuffing his business card in Mitton’s pocket. “When this is all over,” he said, “we need to get together and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Santa Rosa Police officers rescued five women in wheelchairs and walkers in Coffey Park as embers blew past and a fire approached.

LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group In her wheelchair, Irene Lopez, 87, and her son Dr. Ed Lopez, 58, talk about their experiences during the Wine Country wildfires in Coffey Park.

McGinnis, the nursing home activist, said the lesson to take from Varenna is to ask tough questions about emergency disasters plans now. “What kind of alarms are there? Is the emergency plan specific to that type of care? How will people get down from the upper floors when the elevators don’t work?” she said. “Those kind of questions.” They’re the kinds of questions Ed Lopez is confident his mother’s care home in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood can answer. The staff of the small home on Keoke Court proved it that night — and the body cam footage from Officers Adams and St. Germain show it. They caught the frantic face of Mario Monte, 23, whose family ran the care home for Lopez’s 87-year-old mother and four other women. He was there to open the door to police, direct them to each bedroom, help put the women in cars and drive them to safety. In the video, the wind is howling. The sky is orange. The camera picks up the flying grey hair of women being pushed down the wheelchair ramp. Irene Lopez screams out in pain as she is lifted out of her red wheelchair. Neither Monte nor police — including Adams, St. Germain and Andrew Van Gundy — leave until each woman is safe. Last weekend, Lopez returned to the barren cul de sac of Keoke Court with her 58-year-old son, Ed, to watch a video clip of her rescue. She choked up. “If it weren’t for Mario, I wouldn’t be alive,” she said, and thanked the police officers, too. “There’s no way he was going to leave any lady behind that he was responsible for,” her son said. “When it’s a small place, it’s like your family. It’s not just a job.” ‍ Lesson Four: Everyone can use a hero “Embers are coming down on us and there’s people still in these houses”