The rains had paused, but everything felt water-logged and the low-hanging clouds turned the late afternoon into dusk. I arrived at La Conchita just a few hours after a cliff gave way during the January downpours and buried the better part of a quiet neighborhood. It was a standard media emergency scene, frantic and melancholy. I scurried around like everyone else looking for someone knowledgeable to talk to. That's when I met two strikingly articulate young rescuers, Jennifer and Janelle.

There were more than a hundred fire and rescue trucks from up and down the Southern California coast, and lots of guys with shovels and heavy equipment. For the most part they seemed to be shoveling the cement-like mud for a few hours then taking breaks. It seemed directionless.

Janelle and Jennifer were part of an all woman squad. CDF - California Department of Forestry - was stamped on the backs of their orange jumpsuits. I thought little of it as I asked them about the digging and got sharp answers about the strategy and the immense odds against finding survivors. It was only the next day, when I sought them out to ask more questions, that an armed guard took me aside and explained that I had to be careful.

The women, he told me, were from a local California Youth Authority prison. Jennifer and Janelle, he added, had been convicted of murder.

Connecting those perky personalities with brutal crimes was jarring. I asked them if the guard was right. They said he was, and when I asked further they explained that they had all but grown up behind bars; Jennifer had been incarcerated from the time she was 13, Janelle since she was 16. Jennifer would later tell me she had used a metal fork on just one occasion in her adult life.

As I was trying to absorb those sobering facts - and it was not easy -- a second accident illuminated another side of these unusual young women. Jimmie Wallet was a resident of La Conchita whose wife and three young daughters had disappeared when his house was swept away by the cascade of mud. He was a focus for reporters from the start because of his long, mud-splattered dreadlocks and sometimes angry confrontations with the police as he helped in the digging for his family.

Then, right in front of us, he had a blow up with some officers and was chased down the adjacent railroad tracks. He was cuffed for while, given a lecture, then released.

Jennifer and Janelle told me they knew him well. They had been working at his side for hours and had clearly bonded. They fought back tears. His mission had become their mission. They talked about his three little girls like they were old friends. Janelle had been assigned to collect the family's belongings scattered in the mud. She treated the items, photos, art work, a Halloween outfit, like treasures.

Wallet's wife and children were later found, all dead. The crews packed up and left. But I was intrigued and visited Janelle and Jennifer a couple of times in prison and spoke to them at length about their lives, their mistakes and the powerful impact La Conchita had apparently had on them.

Both are scheduled to be paroled this year. Their relationship with Wallet provided sort of an emotional bookend to their dark journeys through prison. It seemed like a stepping stone. There was a chance that the tragedy, perhaps because it was so sad and had hit them so personally, might propel them to something better. At least it seemed like a possibility.

Their rooms in prison seemed to capture it all. There were shelves with snacks. Lots of fruity beauty products. Rough albums with family pictures. The women giggled like kids as they gave me tours of the treasures crammed into rooms the size of the closets many young women their age would enjoy. It was hard to look at their sheepish smiles, behind those heavy steel doors, within those bleak cement block walls, and wonder how they could beam so brightly still.

I had never been to a prison or correctional facility before. So when the opportunity to go along and produce the piece with Jim came up, I was excited.

I looked forward to seeing life inside. The experience was a sobering one. Jennifer and Janelle are very friendly and likeable young ladies. It was hard to imagine they had been involved in murders.
I think many of us forget our own mistakes and are quick to judge others for their faults.

But they were genuine in their feelings, emotions and didn't hold back or hide anything about their past, present or future. This was refreshing.

I feel their story illustrates that despite adversity they wanted to prove they have changed. To me they trully seemed to have taken a bad situation and turned it into something positive.

I wish them luck in the future and hope other young people will learn from what they've been through and prevent them from taken the wrong road.