Parents grieve tiniest victims of California storms: One died instantly, the other is the ‘little boy we’re still trying to find’

From the muck they pulled his mother’s laptop and the pink pencil case she carried as a special ed teacher at Lillian Larsen Elementary school where Kyle was a kindergartener.

They still haven’t found Kyle.

The churning floodwaters that ripped his little hand from his mother’s desperate grip as they bailed out of their engulfed SUV have finally begun to recede, revealing tangled balls of branches and debris.

But no Kyle.

“You want to see something. You think you’re going to be the one to find him,” his father, Brian Doan, told the Bay Area News Group this past week, more than a week after the boy disappeared. “It’s hard to comprehend exactly where someone that weighs only 52 pounds, how would you be carried downstream? And where would you be now?”

The tiniest two

The sun finally broke through Tuesday after three weeks of battering storms – the deadliest and most destructive in California in five years – and the scope of the tragedy is now becoming clear.

At least 21 people were killed across the state, including a 72-year-old Santa Cruz man hit by a falling tree and a San Jose couple caught in a Yosemite landslide. If his body is found, Kyle would become victim number 22.

Only one was younger – a blond-haired toddler who loved dancing and his tricycle and was sitting on the living room couch just a few feet from his father when the trunk of a giant redwood snapped from 40 feet high. Like a steel girder dropping midair from a construction crane, it crashed straight through his family’s double-wide mobile home in Sonoma County.

The boy’s parents, Dan and Isha Tocchini, had named their child Aeon (pronounced Eon), a name in Greek mythology that means eternity. He was only 2.

In many ways, the loss of these tiniest two would come to define the cruel whims of the catastrophic storms that terrorized the end of 2022 and brought fresh grief to the start of 2023.

One child snatched by a surging torrent, the other buried under a free-falling tree.

One child wrenched from his mother’s fingers and lost down a serpentine river; the other killed instantly, exactly where his father had left him a moment before.

The Doans (rhymes with drones) and the Tocchinis (pronounced Toe-Keenees) live 200 miles apart: Kyle’s parents near the mission town of San Miguel just north of Paso Robles, Aeon’s parents in the community of Occidental west of Santa Rosa. But in interviews this past week with the Bay Area News Group, they shared a deep connection built from tremendous grief and unexpected moments of grace.

Aeon died five days before Kyle disappeared, when an ominous “bomb cyclone” barreled toward the California coast in early January. His parents arranged a private viewing at the mortuary, where he lay beneath his favorite blue blanket hand dyed by his grandmother. Miraculously, despite the force of the tree, he didn’t have a scratch on him.

“He was perfect,” said his mother, Isha. Knowing he didn’t suffer “is a comfort to us.”

That’s why their hearts especially ache for Kyle’s parents.

“Having gone through everything we just did and to not know,” Dan Tocchini said, referring to the Doans’ anguish. “That’s intense. … Wow.”

To not know. To know too much. Both are tearing at Brian and Lindsy Doan.

“We still don’t have him,” said Brian, standing on the muddy banks of the vast Salinas River four miles downstream from where Kyle was separated from his mother. “That’s the hard part – not having him.”

‘Don’t worry, Mommy’

On the night of Sunday, Jan. 8, the Doan family had easily passed through water covering two dips on San Marcos Road. So the next morning, the first day back to school after winter break, Lindsy took the same route. Storm clouds obscured the sunrise and no road closure signs warned of imminent danger.

This time, the storm waters crossing the rural roadway lifted her SUV and carried it into the swollen stream.

As water began to fill the cabin, she yelled at Kyle to come up front.

“’Don’t worry, Mommy, it’s OK. Things will be alright,’” Kyle told his mother, Brian said. “That was the last conversation they had.”

Kyle was their third child – a rambunctious boy they called their “rainbow baby” – a joyful addition born when their daughter Melanie was 11 and their son Tyler was 13. Brian, a substitute teacher, and Lindsy, who had at long last earned her teaching credential, had settled into the life they had longed for, a stable home in a gated community where they could spend more carefree time raising their children.

But here they were, mother and son surrounded by roiling floodwaters. The SUV spun around after its fender struck a tree, and Lindsy managed to open the door as Kyle, wearing a dark blue puffer jacket with red lining, climbed over the console.

His mother slid into the water and clung to a tree. She remembers “trying to grab Kyle’s hand,” she told The Associated Press, “but the current pushed Kyle out and our hands slipped.”

He was floating away backward. She saw his face.

“He was looking at me.”

Trying to catch Kyle

As Kyle was swept away, Lindsy let go of the tree and for more than a quarter mile rode the current, trying to catch him. The raging creek curved and twisted and crossed the road again, and at times she got as close as 10 feet. Logs and debris pounded and jostled her and repeatedly pulled her under.

In her struggle, Brian said, she lost sight of Kyle.

She screamed. And kept screaming.

Neil Collins and his wife, Danielle, who run a fruit tree business on 80 acres, were surveying the rising creek when they heard what sounded at first like the high-pitched squeal of an animal.

“The wind was wicked at that point,” he said, so it was tough to tell, but they quickly realized it was something else.

“It was a primal scream of someone who is absolutely desperate,” Neil said.

While Danielle called 911, Neil raced to the raging stream that had been bone dry for three years until late December.

Stunned, he spotted a limp, dark-haired figure face up in the water. At first, he could hardly comprehend what was happening.

Then he saw Lindsy struggling in the current and implored her to grab a tree.

Somehow, she managed to wrap her arm around a branch, buying her rescuers precious time to retrieve a rope. With one toss from Neil, Lindsy caught the line and held on as Neil and a farmworker pulled her across chest-high waters to shore.

“My son!” she cried as she climbed out.

Neil took off downstream, but the current was faster than he could run.

A golden boy

Five days earlier, the third atmospheric river since Christmas bore down on Joy Road, a narrow, winding path of redwood groves and hidden homes seven miles from Bodega Bay.

Dan Tocchini, 39, a self-employed software engineer, and his 32-year-old wife, Isha, a freelance photographer, rented the mobile home when Aeon was just a baby. They fell in love with the 13 acres that came with it, plenty of room for Isha to raise goats and chickens and train horses and for Aeon to follow along with his little John Deere wheelbarrow. As the rain poured down and huge gusts bent the trees, Isha went out to cloak the horses in blankets.

Dan was doing pushups in the living room next to Aeon, whom they nicknamed “Goldie,” a golden boy with golden hair who “was just a light of sunshine,” his grandmother, Aileen Tocchini, said.

The tree that destroyed their home was the second to come down that night. The first hit the bumper of Dan’s truck. When he returned from inspecting it, he moved Aeon under his desk to play with his handheld Super Mario Galaxy game there. It was about 5:15 p.m. and the wind gusts were blowing nearly 60 mph.

Aeon, wearing only a diaper, wandered back to the couch, and as Dan turned to face his little boy, it happened.

“It just hit so fast. I just saw – it looked like the white of the roof,” Dan said. “It was just really loud and it threw me back.”

It didn’t sound like a crash, he said. “It sounded like Godzilla walking.”

‘Supposed to protect my family’

Somehow, Dan ended up on the floor, spared and safe in a cocoon surrounded by collapsed roof and other wreckage. But where was Aeon?

Isha had witnessed it all in horror from outside. She was returning from the barn and had just crested a hillside road above the house when she heard the crack and watched the tree fall, in what seemed like slow motion.

“The house looked like water that splashed up because there was nothing left,” she said.

Her husband and only child – both must be gone, she thought. She started to scream.

Somehow, though, Dan emerged, then dove back into the wreckage.

“Goldie! Goldie!” he shouted. He listened for a voice, a cry, a whimper. There was nothing.

He scrambled across redwood branches and boughs of flat green needles, wooden cabinets and two-by-fours and metal roofing and finally to the armless brown leather couch. The trunk of a redwood, too big to put his arms around, had landed squarely on top of it.

He knew Aeon must be underneath. Dan groped under the tree and the ceiling tiles until he touched the cool softness of his son’s naked arm. He felt for a pulse but found none.

With all his might, the father strained to try to heave the enormous trunk. But it was 70 feet long, stretching beyond the double-wide mobile home on both sides. It didn’t budge.

“I was jumping up, trying to find something, trying to get a big stick and lever it, but then the stick would break, and I got a long speaker but the speaker broke in half,” he said. “I’m supposed to protect my family. That’s the part where I can make myself cry – just thinking about that feeling and screaming his name and struggling to get him.”

Neighbors ran over with chainsaws, and for 30 agonizing minutes, they cut sections of the trunk until, finally, they could roll it off. There lay Aeon, curled up on his side. Like he was sleeping.

Prayers from the president

Now, 18 days after Aeon died, and 13 since Kyle disappeared, the Tocchinis and the Doans are finding their way from one day to the next. The Tocchinis were offered an immediate refuge by a couple who own a rental house near Sebastopol.

In the days after Aeon died, his parents returned to their flattened home and pulled out his clothes and toys, a red plastic sports car, his yellow wheelbarrow and silver trike. They’re planning a memorial service for him next month.

As the days drag on in San Miguel with no discovery, Brian and Lindsy Doan have encouraged their two teenagers to return to school, if they can bear it. Tyler, who shared a room with his little brother, had borrowed a wetsuit and searched along the water’s edges for a week. The other day, Brian called Kyle’s doctor’s office to cancel a routine physical scheduled for next week.

“He’s unfortunately listed as a missing person,” Brian told the assistant. “They already knew.”

Just about everybody knows, including President Biden who visited the storm-ravaged Central Coast on Thursday.

“That little boy we’re still trying to find,” Biden said standing in front of a damaged pier at Seacliff State Beach. “Everybody I’ve talked to so far today just spontaneously brings that up.”

Search crews from the National Guard and neighboring counties that launched dive teams and drones and helicopters all left over the past week. So have extended relatives who arrived to comfort the family and bought waders and gloves to help with the search.

Three small teams with search dogs from the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Office have continued on, and on Saturday hundreds of reinforcements joined them from Cal Fire and 10 other sheriff’s agencies. Since the beginning, Ricardo Ortiz, a vineyard foreman who couldn’t report to work because the fields flooded, beckoned his crew – Rodrigo, Felipe, Diego and Eduardo –  to help.

“My mom was the one that encouraged us to come out here,” Ricardo’s son, Celso Ortiz, said Wednesday. “She said that if her kids got lost, she would like the community to come help.”

For now, the Tocchinis and Doans are coming to terms with loss in their own ways.

“It was God’s will. It’s not up to us. We can’t choose it,” Isha Tocchini said. So she looks for blessings: that her husband survived, that she was in place to witness it and that despite the tremendous blow of the tree, her son came out of the wreckage “so perfect looking.”

There’s something else, too. As much as she believed that Aeon was “in a better place,” she didn’t truly understand that until she visited the mortuary last week. Dan had rushed him so quickly to paramedics that night, she didn’t have a chance to hold him.

For the viewing, an attendant had laid Aeon’s body on a little wicker chaise and tucked the blue blanket delicately under his chin. Isha let out a scream when she first saw him. But quickly, deeply, she realized something that she hopes the Doans will have a chance to experience as well.

“It was just like, wow, this is just a body. This is just a vessel that carried him,’” she said. “It was a relief for me then because I could let go of that attachment, because it’s just the earthly picture. He wasn’t killed by a tree. He was sent home.”

Returning to the river

With Kyle still missing, the Doans are far from experiencing such comfort.

“It’s still very surreal to know that he’s not here next to me,” Brian said, his voice breaking. “Maybe this is one of those alternate realities and somehow that Monday morning I got beamed into this alternate reality, and I should be back where Kyle is still there.”

The first two days after Kyle was swept away, Lindsy wouldn’t eat.

“She said she wanted to deal with the same issues that he was, in her way,” Brian said, “and if he wasn’t eating, she didn’t want to eat.”

No matter how many days go on, the couple can’t shake the feeling that their 5-year-old boy is “cold and alone.”

The family attended a candlelight vigil last Thursday in San Miguel’s community park. The priest from the historic Mission visited Lindsy to pray.

The day after mother and son lost their grip on each other, Lindsy insisted Brian drive her to the edge of the Salinas River. She still can’t bear to get behind the wheel herself.

She was certain then, Brian said, that “this is where Kyle was,” maybe clinging to a tree or pulled to shore.

All they saw was a congested speedway of logs and trees careening down the river. “We felt helpless,” he said.

Yet Brian returned to that spot on the banks of the Salinas on the first sunny day since the storms subsided this week. The water had dropped 8 feet.

He looked across the wide expanse of the river that flows to the north. He saw dozens of coursing rivulets, thousands of trees and newly exposed brambles and bushes.

But still, no Kyle.

All he wants is to bring him home.

GoFundMe fundraisers have been set up for the families of KyleDoan and Aeon Tocchini.