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A disabled Australian man has been killed after his cottage was razed in the LA fires – despite his mother’s desperate attempts to extinguish the fire with a garden hose.
Rory Callum Sykes, 32, died when his cottage on his mother’s estate in Malibu burned down on Thursday.
Mr Sykes was born blind with cerebral palsy. He had difficulty walking and worked as a motivational speaker.
‘I’m totally heartbroken,’ his mum Shelley Sykes said in a heartfelt post on social media.
She described Mr Sykes, a British-born Australian citizen, as a ‘wonderful son’ who ‘overcame so much with surgeries and therapies to regain his sight and to be able to learn to walk’.
‘Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica.’
Mr Sykes had his own cottage on his mother’s 17-acre Malibu estate when the property was engulfed by fire on Thursday.
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