Thermal is a predominantly low-income, unincorporated community in the Coachella Valley, a region where the climate crisis is felt extremely disproportionately between rich and poor. While its wealthiest zip codes are lined with desert resorts, golf courses, and luxury communities, the valley is also home to some of the state’s lowest income neighborhoods facing ongoing legacies of disinvestment, disproportionate pollution, uninhabitable housing conditions, polluted drinking water, and an unbearable extreme heat burden in the desert’s many triple-digit days.

The systems meant to protect him had failed.