Video shows family salvaging belongings amid Los Angeles wildfires, not looters

Police in Los Angeles, California, have arrested several people for looting homes left unattended as wildfires scorched the city, but social media posts claiming to show burglars stealing a television and other items from a burning property are false. The single mother who lives in the home told AFP the footage shows her son and nephews saving their belongings, and this was confirmed by the photographer who took the video.

“People are actively looting and breaking into homes during the worst natural disaster in the history of California,” says text over a video shared January 9, 2025 on Instagram.

The clip shows a hooded Black man carrying a large sack across a street as smoke billows from a house in the background. It then cuts to show other Black men carrying a television out from inside the home.

The video rocketed across Instagram and other platforms such as TikTok and X, spreading in English and Spanish as wildfires torched America’s second largest city, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate and killing at least 25 people. Several posts described the men as “Kamala Harris voters” or “the usual suspects.”

“Fires and looting. A regular Democrat run city,” says one Instagram post. “There’s nothing to see here.”

Officials have vowed to prosecute looters and sent police into fire-wrecked neighborhoods to deter wrongdoing and reassure displaced residents that their properties would be safe, some of whom were so concerned that they were taking turns patrolling their streets on their own.

But arrests have nonetheless mounted, and the county’s district attorney said January 13 that nine people have been charged for looting in areas razed by the fires.

The widespread video of people emptying out one house, however, has been misrepresented.

The single mother who had been renting the home told AFP the video shows her son and nephews helping her clear out the home as it caught fire.

Videographer, news outlets say family was salvaging belongings

France 24 traced the clip to an Instagram story, since posted to YouTube, by Los Angeles-based photographer Jamie Lee Taete (archived here and here).

Taete told AFP he filmed the videos on January 8 in Altadena, around midday.

“I did take those videos, and those people were not looting,” Taete said in a January 15 email. “They were helping to move items across the street, away from the approaching fire.”

Reverse image searches also surfaced an interview that KTLA 5 reporter Chip Yost conducted outside the same house during the local news station’s live coverage of the fires on January 8 (archived here). A timestamp on the station’s coverage shows the interview took place roughly 30 minutes after Taete said he recorded his videos.

Yost, who said he was reporting from the Altadena side of the area’s border with the city of Pasadena, reported that “the folks who live here and their friends emptied this house out of a bunch of their stuff.”

The camera panned to show a stash of items piled on the other side of the road.

Yost then spoke to a woman who identified herself as Teandra. She said she lived in the house with her three sons and that her family and friends “got what we could get” as the house caught fire.

The interview appears to show two of the same men from the video spreading online, based on their outfits. The house, meanwhile, is identifiable by the number “161” beside the front door.

Mother says video shows son, nephews

Using the information from KTLA 5’s report, AFP geolocated the footage to 161 W Woodbury Road in Altadena (archived here).

Keyword searches for the address revealed that the person who lives there — and spoke to Yost — is Teandra Pitts.

Further searches surfaced a GoFundMe fundraiser created for Pitts’s family, as well as her social media profiles (archived here).

Reached via Instagram direct message, Pitts told AFP on January 14 that she does believe her home was looted at some point after the fires reached it. She said her front door was broken and shoes, clothing, appliances and jewelry were all stolen.

An NPR correspondent who said he spent the day with her on January 9 and interviewed her also reported that her place had been looted, with her son’s sneaker collection and her washer-dryer among the items lost (archived here).

But the video spreading online does not show any looters or wrongdoing, Pitts clarified.

The man filmed wearing red and lifting her TV through the doorway is her son. The other man carrying the TV and the man hauling a large sack are her nephews. They were saving her possessions as the blazes reached her home.

“Those are my nephews! And my son!” Pitts told AFP. “Those are all my family and friends in the video. Those are my TVs and some of my children’s clothing.”

“Every last one is my family. I was right there begging them to get things and the firefighters were too. The news cast was there while we were doing it.”

Pitts said she feels “enraged” that people are “giving false info” as she copes with the tragedy, which she said has also displaced her from a job in Pasadena.

The home is not livable and she is staying temporarily in an Airbnb rental but trying to find longer-term shelter for herself and her dogs, she added.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the fires here and here.

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