Dad’s Last Voicemail Is All Daughter Has Left of Him After Catastrophic Fire Killed Him and Her Little Brother

For Christmas, Hajime White’s daughters gave her a stuffed green frog with a heartbreaking purpose. When she squeezes it, the toy plays the final voicemail her father left — a message he recorded before he and White’s younger brother, who had cerebral palsy, were killed in last year’s Eaton fire.

“I don’t have anything of my dad,” White, now 51, says. “The only thing I have to hold onto now is that frog with my dad’s voice inside.”

“He’s not here, but he’s here,” she adds. “He’s telling me again, ‘Merry Christmas and I love you.’”

White’s father, Anthony Mitchell, was 68 and an amputee. Her brother, Justin Mitchell, was 35. Both died when the wildfire swallowed their California home.

“My father died a hero, not leaving my brother alone,” White says. “He would have done it for any of us. I’m not mad at my dad for what he did — it just gave me more love for my dad, because he made sure that the baby of the family didn’t go by himself.”

A year ago today, White was logging onto her work computer in Arkansas when her father called. He told her he needed to evacuate — but that getting out would be difficult because both he and Justin used wheelchairs.

By the time they ended the call, the fire had reached their yard.

White waited for him to call again. He never did.

“After I got off the phone, I started feeling it in my chest — moving around my heart. You know how when paper is crumbling? That’s how my chest was feeling,” she says.

Not long after, White’s other brother, Jordan Mitchell — who was in the hospital when the fires broke out — called with news she still struggles to absorb: “Dad and Justin didn’t make it out.”

A year later, White says listening to her father’s 911 call for help feels like being pulled back into the same terror.

“It’s like reliving a nightmare,” she says. “I’m thinking about how they were sitting there waiting for help — and no one came.”

The images she can’t shake are just as painful. “I see the flames,” she says. “I imagine my dad sitting there in the wheelchair and flames coming out of him. And I think about my brother laying there and flames coming out of him.”

She wants to believe they didn’t suffer. But she fears that isn’t how it ended.

As she continues trying to heal, White says some days are manageable — and others are overwhelming.

“My husband says I jump in my sleep. My daughters keep more of an eye on me now,” she says. “When I’m home alone I get scared, I get frightened, I cry, I’ll scream.”

At her home in Warren, Ark., White has created a small memorial to keep them close. Inside are a bottle of Crown Royal and a cigar for her dad, and she keeps a bag of chips on hand for Justin.

She also finds herself drawn to green — the color of her father’s eyes.

The frog that plays his last voicemail is green. So is a stuffed dragon she bought at Walmart that reminds her of Justin. “I picked it up and I couldn’t let it go,” she says. “I was consoled by it.”

A GoFundMe has been established to help White and her family during this difficult time — and a separate one was started for her surviving brother, who shared an update as the one-year anniversary approached.

In his update, Jordan wrote that the milestone resurfaced the shock of “waking up in the hospital to the devastating news that my entire immediate family had passed away and that my home had completely burned down.”

Still, he said that “in the midst of that darkness, a light shown…this community.”

“I remember thinking of my friends as real-life Avengers, assembling to support me and creating this fundraiser,” Jordan wrote, adding that he has “no words to express my gratitude” to those who helped him.

“The love and support you showed up with during the hardest year of my life has meant everything to me,” he wrote. “Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to each and every one of you.”