He could not save his friends. Now Camp Fire Survivor's Video Is Drawing Anger

PARADISE, Butte County – Greg Woodcox. The firestorm that would be known as the Fire Camp was bearing down on their rural home. They had only seconds to get out.

But despite Woodcox's efforts to save the small group, a fast-moving flames overtook their vehicles as they bunched up behind him on the Edgewood Lane Thursday morning.

Had they gotten out of their time, they might have made it out too, he said.

"I'm in shock," Woodcox, 58, said in a tearful interview Sunday. "Those poor souls. I tried to get them out, but we were trapped like rats. "

Woodcox witnessed the first fatalities documented in the Camp Fire, whose death toll was increased to 29 by Sunday. Moved to record what he saw, he captured the scene with his phone – a video that would later become a survivor.

Woodcox on Sunday recounts the horror of watching a close friend, the man's mother and three others die before turning and running for his own life. A fox, he said, he has been scrambled across the road and stepped into a stream, where he has been submerged for 45 minutes, waiting for the relentless inferno.

"I do not know how to make it," he said. "I got in a 3-foot deep V-cut in the stream. This thing came over me and roared like a furnace from Hell. I said, 'Oh Lord, no, no.' "

After surviving the intense flames, he hiked up the fire-scarred hillside. Back on Edgewood Lane, he found his Jeep Cherokee about 40 yards from the charred vehicles with the engine still running and his two Chihuahuas, Romey and Jules, alive in the back seat.

"I can not believe my truck and my dogs made it," he said. "I can not wrap my brain around it. This is the Holy Spirit at work. "

His first instinct was to begin with what he had done, so he got his hands on the record, capturing the horrific aftermath, including the grisly remains of his dead friends.

The footage is stark, offering a rare and brutal view of a wildfire's ferocity and danger. The skeletal remains of several victims are charred beyond recognition no more than an hour after the hit siege.

"Nobody made it," Woodcox says in the video. "These people all got burned out. I was right down below them here. My friend, you can see his dead, and his mother. "

Woodcox's nephew, Matthew Strausbaugh, later posted on YouTube, causes an uproar in Paradise, where many residents have been talking about it and are outraged.

"That was so insensitive," Tamara Houston said of the video as she and others rescued trapped horses around the community on Sunday. "You do not need to show people's lives in the middle of such a horrible tragedy."

Strausbaugh said he was torn on whether to post the video. He offered it to several local television stations and said he was even scolded by a local reporter due to the content.

"I figured the good and the bad of releasing it," he said. "It shows some horrific things, but one of those people, that's one person, and then their deaths are not in vain."

Strausbaugh said he's been getting positive feedback from the video too. Many commentators empathize with Woodcox, who is clearly traumatized by what had happened.

Woodcox, who is a self-described "mountain person," lives mostly out of his green Jeep, where he keeps a watchful eye on the landscape.

He is thin with a thick mustache surrounded by gray stubble. He has been admitted to a state of charge in prison for other charges. He said he is bipolar and "high-strung," speaking in fragments that can be hard to follow. On Saturday, he said, he had a nervous breakdown after processing what he'd been through.

The morning of the fire, he was visiting a dog park when he spotted the flames coming towards town. Feeling the intense winds and watching the fire explode in size, he got in his SUV and began warning people about the nearing monster.

After warning his adult and his former wife at their separate homes, he headed to the end of Edgewood where his paraplegic friend lived with his mom.

"I said, 'Get out! You're going to die if you do not get out! "Woodcox recalled. "I did everything I could do. I dragged one of them to the car. "

He drove the caravans of vehicles, which included more neighbors, but he was one of the following. Woodcox continued down the road. When he turned around, it was too late. Fire had overtaken the cars, with glass shattering in loud pops, he said.

He figured he was next, so he turned to the flames, said a prayer and prepared to meet the God he'd recently started believing in.

"I saw a fox was running for his life, so I said, 'No Lord, we're coming too,'" he said.

When he got to the stream at the bottom of the ravine, he began to panic to the hot tub, "he said. He remembered learning to steady his breathing through martial arts training and relaxed himself to the roared roared overhead "like a freight train."

"When I got back and saw my dogs, I was crying and barely holding myself," he said.

His Jeep still drives, but much of the plastic, including the bumpers, tail lights and other parts on the outside of the vehicle melted. He's been sleeping in the SUV at rest stops area, driving around duing the day, thinking about his ordeal.

"It's just really hard – I'm traumatized," he said. "But I have to believe what I was going to be for a reason."