If there is one phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Eaton fire for the Benn family of Altadena, it’s recognizing and embracing the healing gift of music.
More than a year after the fire, they continue to give that gift to themselves and their beloved community.
This extended family — including aunts, uncles and cousins — lost 17 dwellings in Altadena last year. And while family members continue an arduous struggle of rebuilding, some of the Benn family has turned their emotions and passions back toward entertaining and trying to share comfort with song.
The Benn Family performers, a.k.a. the Benn Family Band — a group of professional and semi-professional musicians — was sharing songs at a church gathering last year. After a cousin put a video of them on social media and it went viral, the family was asked to appear on “America’s Got Talent,” where they shared both their vocal performances and their message of hope and remembrance for Altadena.
“That’s literally what brought us back,” said Laurie Benn, who performs in different configurations of family ensembles with her husband Oscar, who usually plays keyboards, some of their children, and other members of the talented line, who sometimes sit in on instruments at different events and venues throughout the area.
The Benn Family performs at a “Strong Together” rebuild solution summit at the Pasadena Convention Center on Feb. 21. (Photo by Jarret Liotta)Talking about their experiences over the past year, from fleeing the fire to landing on a world-famous stage with their TV appearance, Laurie Benn grew extremely emotional.
The family was in the heart of the drama on Jan. 7, 2025, she said, when the Eaton fire started just up the hill from her mother-in-law’s house, where her husband was visiting that night. No notifications or warnings of any kind reached them. The next door neighbor never made it out and died.
See the Benn family’s performance on “America’s Got Talent” here.Seeing how intense the flames looked from a distance — and learning from a neighbor that the fire was quickly descending — Laurie Benn raced over there to help them evacuate, but was unable to get phone service to reach back to her children and grandchildren at her house, in order to urge them to immediately flee.
Laurie was able to reach her daughter Loren Benn-Nelson, a music professor at Berklee School of Music, in Boston. She, in turn, alerted her siblings and throughout that long night helped coordinate things, including finding them a hotel to stay at, before she herself flew back to see her family the next night.
“Our entire lineage lives in Altadena,” said Loren, noting that around 200 of her relatives were displaced by the fires, with 17 homes destroyed and at least four others made uninhabitable by damage.
Oscar and Laurie met in church through their music, became friends performing together, fell in love and ultimately got married. While Laurie comes from Chicago, Oscar, an Altadena native, was raised by a father who moved to Altadena from Georgia with about 15 of his siblings back in the 1940s, the descendants of whom made up more than 200 members of the Benn family living in the town.
“We’re known around town as a family that just sings and performs, as we did my whole life,” Loren said. “The Sunday right after the fire, we were staying in an Airbnb at that point. We really didn’t know what else to do, and our church had found a different church home to have a service, so we thought it would be some sort of normalcy to just go and sing, so we went to church and sang and one of our cousins, who also lost their home in the fire, took a video of us.”
“Shortly after that the producers of ‘America’s Got Talent’ reached out,” she said. “I guess they saw the video.”
Oscar Benn performs on keys alongside his son, Linden, on drums at a “Strong Together” rebuild solution summit at the Pasadena Convention Center on Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Jarret Liotta)On the producer’s suggestion, at their first appearance the family sang the song “Rescue,” written by Lauren Daigle, the lyrics of which include, “You are not hopeless. Though you have been broken, your innocence stolen, I hear you whisper underneath your breath. I hear your S.O.S.”
Laurie shared how when the family heard the song, they all began crying, as it was such a perfect lyric to their emotions and experience.
“We all burst into tears because the lyrics of that song fit us so well at that time,” she said.
After they had finished on the show and were leaving, Laurie said they saw host Simon Cowell leaving at a distance and called a goodbye to him. Cowell came over, she said, thanked them for their appearance and stressed that they continue sharing about their town.
“‘Now that you’ve been on the show, you have a platform that you probably didn’t have before,’” Laurie remembered him saying. “He told us to keep the story of Altadena’s tragedy alive and to continue letting people know that Altadena is out there, that it exists and it needs help.”
The family has sought to do just that moving forward.
While they continue to slog through the intense emotions of their loss, as well as deal with the various practical challenges they still face being displaced, the music is doing something special both for them and those whom it touches.
“Ever since, we’ve just continued to sing,” Laurie said. “We feel like we want to be a part of the recovery with what we can offer with our voices. We’re still struggling (but) we feel like we can offer comfort.”
Jarret Liotta is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and photographer.
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