Cousins in Arizona found common ground as firefighters

PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Grant McKee was a talkative toddler who gave away his toys to playmates and chattered to strangers in Costa Mesa restaurants. He grew into a wiry, dark-haired teenager with a big group of friends and a promising wrestling career in the 103-pound weight class at Newport Harbor High School.

But during high school, McKee and his friends fell in with a rich, hard-partying crowd in Newport Beach that drank and used drugs. McKee began to worry his life would go nowhere unless he left Orange County.

With his mother’s blessing, McKee, then 17 and a senior, left for the mountains of central Arizona to live with his aunt and cousin, Robert Caldwell.

At first, the boys fought.

But in time Caldwell, just two years older, became an uncle of sorts to the uprooted teenager, an only child whose parents had divorced. The older took the younger on camping and fishing trips and introduced him to the world of firefighting.

“He saw Robert getting ready for work, putting on that uniform,” McKee’s mother, Marcia McKee, said. “He really looked up to him.”

Following Caldwell to find “the fire path,” as firefighters call it, helped McKee put his life on track. Three months ago, he landed a job with the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, where Caldwell had worked for three seasons.

The fire path united the cousins, and the fire path killed them.

A lightning strike Friday sparked the massive blaze that took the life of McKee, Caldwell and 17 other Granite Mountain hotshot firefighters outside Yarnell, Ariz., on Sunday afternoon. McKee had just turned 21. Caldwell was 23.

When McKee first moved to Arizona, the cousins felt they had little in common, friends said. McKee liked girls and sports and talking to people. Caldwell, the outdoorsman, spoke only when he had something to say.

But as months wore on, neighbors learned to drive slowly down the flat, broad street as the boys started to toss a football around. Caldwell towered over McKee, but the younger cousin was scrappy: a wrestler and a boxer, training to run a half-marathon. Sometimes, four or five other guys gathered with them at the end of the road, where the air smelled like juniper and the asphalt turned to dirt.

The cousins frequently walked across the street to the house of Jeff Jacobs, 57, whose Parkinson’s disease had grown worse in recent years. They helped move boxes, keep up his yard and — the highlight — tend to an orange 1969 Camaro parked in the garage.

Caldwell and McKee rotated the tires, changed the oil and wiped down the convertible’s sculpted body. Sometimes, they stayed to settle in the garage, crack open a few beers and watch a football game.

In Arizona, his mother said, McKee met friendlier teenagers with less money and more plans. He worked at a Mexican restaurant, enrolled in community college. He grew up.

About two years ago, McKee told friends he wanted to fight fires like his cousin. Then he called his mom.

“I really want to do it,” she remembers him saying. He had first donned a firefighter outfit for Halloween in third grade, his face smudged with soot. The memory lingered, she said, but Arizona convinced him.

She fretted that he was too sensitive for the job. Sometimes it would be sad, she cautioned, and never glamorous.

He would not be dissuaded.

“This is what I want to do,” she remembered him saying. He had always been an old soul, the child who asked for slippers on Christmas. And he had made the grown-up choice to move to Arizona to change his own life.

He went through training at the Arizona Wildfire and Incident Management Academy, a firefighting certification crash course for aspiring hotshots. The trainees learned to deploy their heat shields, which McKee eventually tried to use during the fire that killed him.

“You’ve got to have a fire in your heart, because you don’t fight fires for yourself,” said John Nelson, 20, an oil field worker who completed his fire certification alongside McKee. Other friends said firefighting had been a transformational experience, that McKee stood straighter and took pride in his work.

Not long after McKee began his training, Caldwell got married and moved away from the family home. He, his wife and her 5-year-old son settled into a new family rhythm.

McKee began dating a woman he met at his college graduation party. They and another roommate moved to a four-bedroom house in Prescott. Soon, the once-inseparable cousins saw each other only at Station 7, a gray, sun-beaten building near downtown Prescott that housed the Granite Mountain crew.

Just before he started work in April, McKee visited his mother in Costa Mesa. He told her he would be saving his paychecks so he could take her to Tahiti in February.

He also brought his girlfriend, confessing out of earshot that he wanted to propose, but had no money to buy a ring. His mother later sent a temporary ring to use until the couple could pick out something permanent.

Now, when family members and friends think of the cousins, they tend to think of them together.

Memories come back, like the time one of their friends’ cars, a white Jeep, shifted into gear by itself and started slowly backing up across the street, toward the pristine Camaro. The car was spared when the Jeep hit a tree.

Friends now laugh recalling McKee and Caldwell chasing the car, trying to save the day, together.

laura.nelson@latimes.com

Times staff writer Nelson reported from Los Angeles and special correspondent Phippen from Prescott. Times staff writers Louis Sahagun in Prescott and Samantha Schaefer in Los Angeles contributed to this report.