oon after the sun set over Santa Barbara, Ann Hagan grabbed a marker and wrote a short message to the 20 strangers who died in the devastating Montecito mudslides.
“In our hearts,” she wrote before signing her name on a whiteboard put up at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.
Hagan was one of thousands of people who huddled at the courthouse late Sunday evening to take part in a candlelight vigil.
They came to pay tribute to the young and old — among them mothers, fathers, grandparents, small children — who did not survive when rainwater poured down fire-ravaged slopes and unleashed a deluge of debris into their neighborhoods.