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Courtesy of Perry Allen-Hood

Laurie Allen brought up the rear of a desperate convoy that tried to drive to safety as the Maui wildfires raged around them in early August. The smoke was so thick that Allen could hardly see the road, a relative recalled. Then two brake lights pierced through the smog. Allen later told her family that she saw her neighbors exit their cars and run back toward her — and she soon saw why.

A large banyan tree had fallen across the road, crushing cars and raising a wall of fire between those fleeing and their escape route. As flames surrounded Allen’s group, she saw only one way out, said Penny Allen Hood, Allen’s sister-in-law.

“She ran,” Hood told The Washington Post. “Through … a football-field-long field that was on fire.”

Allen’s dramatic escape on foot, through 100 yards of burning grass, left her body scored with critical burns, her sister-in-law said. She was airlifted to a burn unit in Honolulu, where she continued to fight for her life in surgery. But Allen, 65, died weeks later, on Sept. 29, family members told The Post.

“Her heart was tired, and she was ready,” Hood wrote in an update to <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/per-and-la-allen-maui-fire-victims" target=_blank>an online fundraiser</a>.

Allen is one of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/15/maui-fire-death-toll-missing/" target=_blank>nearly 100 confirmed victims</a> of the wildfires that swept across the Hawaiian island of Maui, reducing the historic beach town of Lahaina to ash. The wildfires were among the deadliest in U.S. history.

Allen had moved to Lahaina with her husband, Perry, about a decade ago, Hood said. Allen worked as an office manager for a physical therapist, and Perry worked on a resort on another part of the island. Together, they found a fresh start in the quiet surroundings of the island, where they took boogie boards to the coast or cycled across the plains.

“They both loved it,” Hood said. “They watched the sunset together every day.”

Allen and her neighbors gathered outside their apartments and watched the fire grow from a distance on the afternoon of Aug. 8, Hood said. It didn’t appear to be headed toward them until the winds quickly changed. They drove through neighborhood roads choked with smoke until the downed tree blocked their path, Allen later told her family.

Perry, who was at the resort at the time, was unable to reach Lahaina because the roads were blocked, Hood said. He received a worried text from his wife: The traffic out of town wasn’t moving. She and the other drivers were stuck.

Maui’s neglected grasslands caused Lahaina fire to grow with deadly speed

When flames encircled their cars, Allen yelled at the group to run and made the choice to plunge into the flames, Hood wrote in the family’s fundraiser. She did not see her neighbors again.

Allen emerged from the blazing field on a main road, where emergency responders treated her, Hood said. A firefighter wrapped his arms around Allen to smother the flames covering her body, and she was rushed to Maui Memorial Medical Center before being airlifted to Straub Medical Center in Honolulu.

At some point, Allen was able to utter her husband’s name and phone number, Hood said. A distraught Perry Allen received a voice message in the evening from a doctor: “We think we have your wife.”

Perry Allen endured his own ordeal to reach Honolulu and prove his wife’s identity to the hospital, Hood said. He recognized Allen’s purple nail polish, but the couple’s documents had gone up in flames with their home. Still, doctors allowed Allen to stay at his wife’s bedside as they raced to treat her, Hood said.

“He would cry every time he’d see ‘Jane Doe’ on her chart,” she said.

Allen drifted in and out of consciousness as doctors prepared skin grafts to treat her burns, and she was able to recount her ordeal to her husband, Hood said. But infections set back her treatment as she endured the searing pain of a body almost completely covered in burns. Allen died “peacefully” with her family present after a seven-week battle, Hood wrote in the family’s fundraiser.

That Allen willed herself in the hospital for that long, after dashing through an inferno, was for the sake of her husband, Hood said. 

Hood said Perry Allen told his wife in a lucid moment that he couldn’t lose her after losing everything else to the flames.

“It was almost like she took a deep breath and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to keep fighting,’” Hood said. “And she did.”

Stanford University, BA in History and MA in Communications

Daniel Wu is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. He joined The Post as an intern on the Metro desk in 2022 and previously worked for the Seattle Times and the San Jose Mercury News.

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Woman dies weeks after escaping Maui wildfires by running through flames

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