After living in his Malibu home for 15 years, Vince married Rain seven years ago. Right up until the fire, he was a collector of rare cars and rare books – all of which were destroyed. Before his retirement, Vince owned AAA Tools – a full-service professional tool supplier. He then tried his hand at acting; since 2010, he has earned 17 acting credits. Rain, originally from Vancouver, is a realtor with Keller Williams Realty in Santa Monica.
On the day of the fire, the couple got an early mandatory evacuation notice – but then lost cell phone and TV reception shortly afterwards, making it impossible to get any further information. Their gardener knocked on the door around 10:30 am and said, ‘You guys have to get out of here, the fire’s in the canyon!” and Rain said, ‘We’ve got to go!”
Although Rain had been busy packing things for several hours, Vince had been evacuated from wildfires twice before and took the warning with a grain of salt. “I didn’t pack anything,” he said. “Then I looked out the back door and the fire was coming over the mountain, and I said, ‘Oh, shit!’ and ran downstairs [to my garage].
“I had a Mercedes SLS 2014 gullwing – but when I tried to start it, the key fob was dead and the alarm went off. So I jumped into the Mercedes I normally drive and hoped for the best. I had only gotten out with what I was wearing: a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals.”
By then, Vince said, Rain had already left – taking everything she had packed along with the family cat. “The smoke blew up the hill and the wind shifted, and I heard this wailing sound – almost like it was human. When I saw a fire truck come right up to our neighborhood gate and then turn right around to leave, I knew there was no hope for any fire support.”
Rain parked down the hill about a mile away and watched the fire. After the main fire front had passed, she tried to drive back up to their house but couldn’t make it because of a large tree branch that had fallen across the road. But before she turned around, the smoke cleared enough that she could see two houses across the canyon. Both were on fire, and she was fairly certain one of them was hers.
“I didn’t want Vince to go back and see the house on fire,” she said, “because I thought he’d be really devastated.” Driving back down to Pacific Coast Highway, Rain saw a group of fire trucks at the gas station, rolled down her car window, and yelled, “Houses are on fire!” The firefighters told her they’d go as soon as they “got organized” – but as they never did go up the hill to help, that clearly never happened.
Vince watched the fire burn for a while from PCH, but couldn’t really see his house because of the thick smoke hanging low over the hillsides. He and Rain eventually met up. “The next day, I didn’t know if my house had burned down or not,” he said. “So I texted the neighborhood water delivery guy and he texted back, ‘Everything on your street is gone.’ My wife and I had a good cry. It was a long time before we could get back into the neighborhood.
“Deanna Madsen, our neighbor (wife of actor Michael Madsen), walked up our driveway the next day and made a video and sent it to us,” Vince said. “I could see my Hummer was burned out and the garage and cars were destroyed – the tires burned off – nothing left. There had been a Lamborghini Countach and two Plymouth Prowlers, including a 1997 that was serial #4 off the production line.”
“There’s a picture of our burned house with the Prowlers sitting on top. There were car stackers; the crossbeam for the upper cars was three feet off the ground and the whole stucco house was on top of everything else,” Vince described. “Many walls were still up and it looked like an amphitheater, but what had been a four-level house was now one level of rubble.”
Besides losing the car collection, Vince also collected, bought and sold rare books. He ran an online bookstore and had about $211,000 worth of signed, first-edition books in his home inventory. “I had just sold a two-book signed set of Michael Crichton’s ‘Jurassic Park’ to Chrichton’s daughter for $1,200 – one of two sets that I’d purchased three months before Crichton died in 2008,” he said. “I had to take my bookstore off line after the fire.” He also lost about $100,000 in leftover inventory from his tool company, items that he was selling on eBay at the time of the fire.
Vince originally bought his home directly from owner/builder Trish Hoffman. “She contacted me right away after the fire, and I had to tell her the bad news,” he said. “I was only the second inhabitant of the house, and I loved it a lot. Trish had filled the house with tiles and moldings she’d found in Europe and did a lot of really cool things when she built it.”
