The Brief

The Eaton Fire didn't just take the Abdus-Shakoor family's home, business and two rental properties. It also destroyed the mosque they co-founded, Masjid Al Taqwa, the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area.

And in the year since the deadly and destructive fire, the family has rallied to provide a place of worship and belonging for other community members who are also trying to make sense of the loss and devastation.

“ It's just been a devastating year, never-ending process of recovery, and a rollercoaster of emotional ups and downs,” said Jihad Abdus-Shakoor, whose parents were among the mosque’s early founders.

Around 30 households from the Masjid Al Taqwa community were affected by the fire: Most lost homes; one woman’s daughter was killed.

Since July, the congregation has met weekly in a space rented from the Pasadena Covenant Church. But their goal is to rebuild the mosque on its original grounds.

The need to bring the community together

Days after the fire, they brought the community together for Jummah prayers (congregational Friday prayers) at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pasadena. A few weeks later, when Ramadan began, the Abdus-Shakoor family decided to find a place of worship.

What remained of Masjid Al Taqwa, the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area, after the Eaton Fire.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said he wanted a break to focus on personal losses, but his father, one of the mosque’s early founders, insisted that the community needed a space for Ramadan.

 "I believe he was correct in saying this: ‘Hey look, we have got to do this for the community,’” he said. “I think he needed it also. It was good for my mother as well.”

The family found a space at New Horizon School in Pasadena to provide congregants with daily iftars and even an Eid celebration, continuing their tradition of providing gifts to the children.

" We just had to kick into gear and try to carry on in a normal way, hopefully to bring the community back and have for them ... a place to still come as a community of Masjid Al Taqwa,” said Delores Abdus-Shakoor, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor’s mother.

But, there were moments, she said, when it felt like too much.

 ”Then all of a sudden, one day I looked up and I said, ‘No, it's not too much,’” she said. “It made me think about where the Qur’an talks about how Allah will not put a burden on you greater than you have strength to bear.”

The Abdus-Shakur family: Jihad Abdus-Shakoor; his wife, Desha Dauchan; mother Delores Abdus-Shakur; and father Aaron Abdus-Shakur.

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Having the space at New Horizons School during Ramadan offered some reprieve. The community had a space to break their fast and offer communal prayers, and she could focus on dealing with the mountains of paperwork from insurance companies, the L.A. County assessor and others.

After Ramadan, they rented temporary places for Friday congregational prayers.

The need for a permanent place was apparent.

People needed a place to pray, said Kameelah Wilkerson, who is on the mosque's board of directors.

"If you look around, you see people just hanging out and talking to each other," she said. "And see my son behind me sitting and talking to the katib [imam], and that is what this space is about."

Interfaith relations after the fire 

Jihad Abdus-Shakoor and another community member took on the work of finding a “temporary, permanent place.”

This is where interfaith relations nurtured after the fires kicked in.

The representatives of Masjid Al Taqwa asked Pasadena Covenant Church, which had previously offered them a space for Ramadan.

The church was very accommodating.

“ We had two rooms,” Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said. “We opened up the wall in between and made it a connected space, bigger, and just put in new carpet.”

The church also allowed Masjid Al Taqwa to repaint the building and remove furniture so it could look and operate like a mosque. It's a spacious room, with thick, blue and gold carpeting, the kind your feet sink into.

Flyers for a Christmas friendship dinner between the Pasadena Covenant Church and Masjid Al Taqwa.

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Aaron Abdus-Shakoor, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor's father, said the response after the fire showed "one humanity."

 "It went across religions, different religions. Everyone was trying to help, and we found kindness in humanity," he said. "And it was our oneness, our kind likeness that people emphasized, not our differences."

The church, he said, welcomes the community for regular dinners for fellowship. After the final Jummah prayers of 2025, Aaron Abdus-Shakoor made an announcement to the congregation: The Pasadena Covenant Church had invited them for a belated Christmas celebration in the new year, and they had even made accommodations for halal food.

The rebuilding process  

In January 2025, I visited Masjid Al Taqwa soon after the fire. All that remained then was soot, ash and the charred skeletons of chairs in a line pointing toward Mecca.

“It was very painful to go and look at the site and see it all burn down and try to wrap our minds around that,” Delores Abdus-Shakoor said about the first time she saw the ruins.

Since then, the lot has been cleared, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said, and mosque leaders are in talks with architects to imagine the mosque’s new iteration.

" We’re in flux on whether we're going to just be rebuilding on the one lot or we're going to be able to have the opportunity to acquire the adjacent lot to expand the mosque,” Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said.

There are also ongoing talks about whether to add other components, such as transitional housing. But, Delores Abdus-Shakoor said, before any plan can be finalized, they will gather community input.

Kameelah Williams, Kameelah Wilkerson, Kamal Wilkerson and Jihad Abdus-Shakur grew up attending Masjid Al-Taqwa.

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Soon after the fires, the greater Muslim community rallied around Masjid Al Taqwa, helping raise just under $1 million to support affected congregants and the mosque.

And Jihad Abdus-Shakoor is confident he can rely on the community again when it comes to rebuilding.

 "We're going to need more support. We're going to have to do more fundraising,” he said.

And that, he said, is true for all of Altadena.

"It's going to take a lot longer to rebuild, and it's going to take more resources, more money to bring the city back,” he said. “Hopefully, people will not forget about us and look closer into what are the actual needs in the community.”

Kameelah Williams, a longtime Masjid Al Taqwa attendee, said she can't wait to see the mosque rebuilt so the community can be continued.

" I also hope to see a space that is welcoming to all in terms of maybe creating some type of business within the masjid, maybe a coffee shop," she said. " Maybe we have a community kitchen, maybe we can do a Meals on Wheels. In my profession, I'm a funeral director, so maybe a Muslim mortuary."

Najla Henderson and her son Zavian stands next to her parents Daarina and Rashad Abdus-Samad.

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Loss of a space she grew up in

While some in the community are staying put and hoping to rebuild, others like Najla Abdus-Samad, who was born and raised in Altadena and grew up attending Masjid Al Taqwa, have had to leave Altadena.

Her new home in Los Angeles is “beautiful,” she said, but there’s nothing like Altadena. And though she has found a new place of worship and community at Islah LA in South Los Angeles, she misses Masjid Al Taqwa.

“I  was born into Masjid Al Taqwa. The women there, the people there, I've known since I was a baby,” Abdus-Samad said. “There's absolutely nothing that can replace that.”

She went from living 5 minutes from Masjid Al Taqwa to about an hour’s drive away in L.A. traffic. But she still makes the trek when she can “for my self preservation.”

It’s been a beloved Los Angeles tradition for well over a decade. On New Year’s Eve, a crowd of people gather around on Santa Monica Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West L.A. to celebrate at midnight.

The crowd isn’t waiting for a ball to drop, or for a bell to toll — not in L.A. Instead, the crowd is waiting for the exact moment that an anti-smoking billboard resets. Its message warns of the dangers of lighting up by showing the number of people who’ve died that year due to smoking.

For one beautiful moment, the billboard shows that not a single American has died from lung cancer or other smoking-related illnesses in the new year. (Of course, there’s no way to know this for sure — the counter is based on previous estimates and statistical averages.)

The billboard has grown from a neighborhood gathering, as the L.A. Times reported in 2012, to a packed viral celebration in the 2020s. Some Reddit users even loosely planned this year’s meetup, and it’s now cemented as a mainstay of how this beautiful, occasionally smoky city rings in the new year.

What’s the origin story?

The billboard dates back to 1987. William E. Bloomfield Sr., an ex-smoker, anti-smoking advocate and Redondo Beach resident, put it up to make the effects of smoking feel more real, according to the L.A. Times.

“I want to do what I can to get even a few people to quit, or at least think about it,” Bloomfield told the Times back then.

Drumroll: What do the sponsors have to say? 

LAist reached out to the billboard’s sponsors to get their take, and long story short: They’re fans of the tradition.

“Seeing the social media response of Angelenos counting down the New Year alongside this billboard is a powerful example of how impactful public awareness can be,” said Jen Maduko, the American Cancer Society’s senior executive director in Los Angeles, in a statement provided to LAist. “Lung cancer continues to claim more lives than any other cancer, and smoking remains the leading preventable cause.”

The ACS also said that they hope that the billboard’s viral status will encourage smokers to quit, or at least make current and former smokers consider getting screened for lung cancer. You can find more info on that from the ACS here.

“Although we appreciate how it brings renewed attention to the effects of smoking, we hope that it encourages action throughout the year,” Maduko added.

So there you have it. The sponsors behind the smoking deaths billboard have given Angelenos the blessing to ring in the new year on the side of the road in West L.A.

Who knows, one day this billboard might become even more iconic than the more traditional celebrations at places like Grand Park in downtown L.A. and the Queen Mary in Long Beach — or even make it to a national telecast.

On the first day of Los Angeles Unified’s Winter Academy, enrollment is 14% lower than last year with about 64,000 students signed up for a week of credit recovery and enrichment camps.

The district moved the program to start in January this year, ahead of the second semester, rather than keep it in December at the end of the first semester, as in previous years. And it is now a full week instead of three days.

“ I believe that even though the enrollment is a bit lower, attendance hopefully will be higher,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Monday.

The program started in 2022 as "acceleration days,” meant to help students make up for lost learning time during the COVID-19 pandemic using winter and spring breaks.

Enrollment has ranged from 71,000 to 74,000 students, with an average attendance of 55% to 60%, according to a statement provided to LAist by a district spokesperson.

Variations on winter recovery

Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies is one of 319 campuses offering Winter Academy. About 200 students attended the school’s enrichment camps, which in addition to STEAM programs (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), included focuses on writing and math.

Middle schoolers at SOCES on Monday crowded around lab tables to watch folded paper flowers bloom when placed in a pan of water, a display of “capillary action”— the movement of sticky water molecules through a porous material.

Norman Goss keeps a foil ball aloft with the power of static electricity as classmate Catherine Galvez, left, watches, on the first day of SOCES' Middle School STEAM Camp during Winter Academy.

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Seventh grader Catherine Galvez said her dad signed her up for the camp because she wants to be an astronomer.

“We're trying to find STEM programs that are like, inviting, but also, like, easy to get into,” Galvez said.

Teacher Riley Leary said unlike the traditional Winter Academy, the Middle School STEAM Camp is not focused on replacing work from the school year.

“This is based on curiosity. This is based on wonder,” Leary said.

Across campus, seventh grader Sophia Bezgubenko's wonder is limited to whether she can bring up her grades in health and science. She's one of the 300 students who are signed up for credit recovery. Bezgubenko is here at her mom’s urging.

“ I'm a little annoyed, but it’s alright,” she said of having to get up early during the last week of winter break.

The Algebra II students in Raymond Toleco's Winter Academy classroom review linear functions and absolute value functions.

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A few doors down, 31 of 35 students enrolled showed up for Raymond Toleco’s Algebra II class.

Toleco said the additional days of Winter Academy give him more time to review with students instead of just assigning them work to complete on their own over the break.

“Mostly I have hardworking students and some of them wanna improve from D to hopefully a B,” Toleco said.