Melissa Cassem still cannot make sense of what happened to her family at their home in the Sierra Nevada during a recent heavy snowfall.
In late March, the Cassems were snowed in after a historic winter storm dropped 10 to 15 feet of snow in Alta, California, about 60 miles northeast of Sacramento. The family had moved to Placer County from the San Francisco Bay Area a year before. It was Melissa and husband Jason's dream home. They uprooted their lives and moved with their 9-year-old son, Geoffrey, and 11-year-old daughter, Juliana.
On March 29, a day after Melissa's 43rd birthday, a snowstorm made the roads to their home impassable and they did not have electricity.
