She Lost Everything in L.A. Fires. Reality Sank in as She Shopped for New Clothes: 'I Broke Down Hysterical' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo from left is Jason, Laura’s partner, and Laura Nativo with her dogs Penelope and Delilah. Photo on right is her burned out apartment building.Photo:Laura Nativo

Laura Nativo

“I naively thought if anyone’s going to be protected, the fire station is literally right there,” Nativo tells PEOPLE, noting that the facility was just across the Pacific Coast Highway. “All the fire trucks were swirling past my house and the super scooper planes were going into the ocean.”

She was wrong.

Nativo, 44, lost her tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Pacific Palisades, where she had called home for 15 years. The entire complex with 75 units was leveled.

She’s hoping a fireproof bag containing irreplaceable scrapbooks from her late mom, who died of breast cancer when Nativo was just 9, might have survived.

Before the fire, her table with photos of her dogs, her late mom and her late unborn son.Laura Nativo

However, she knows the footprint and handprint of her unborn child lost at 17 weeks into her pregnancy is gone, along with the sympathy note from her doctors. She also lost her childhood photos and other cherished memorabilia.

“I wish I had collected all of these things, instead of my stupid passport,” she says. “I’m struggling to find the right words to encapsulate my depth of loss after perhaps the most difficult year of my life.”

AGoFundMe has been launchedto help her “start over.”

She just never believed it would happen — and happen so quickly.

Laura Nativo’s neighbor Dr. Anna Hsu with daughters Catherine (on couch) and Elizabeth (on floor) in Laura Nativo’s living room.Laura Nativo

Nativo’s neighbor Dr. Anna Hsu lived with her daughters aged 10 and 12 next door on the second floor. The family had a little cat named Candy Corn. Hsu was working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and called Nativo to see if someone could retrieve the cat. But they could not get into the apartment and had to leave.

She received a text from Hsu the next morning. “Candy Corn is gone.”

“She sent me a photo. You could see her balcony and nothing else. Just blue sky. I was like, ‘Oh my God. Everything’s gone,’ ” Nativo says. “Her sweet little girls lost their kitten and at this point it was just total despair. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?”

Delilah outside the door of Laura Nativo’s former apartment.Laura Nativo

“There’s a little part of my head that just thought, ‘Do you take the box of photo albums and do you take this?’ And it was like this weird battle in my head because at this point, the fire was not a threat to my area,” Nativo says. “It felt like I was in this nightmare apocalyptic disaster movie where it went from sort of this ridiculous comedy to all of a sudden I’m in a disaster movie.”

Laura Nativo’s apartment complex after the fire.Laura Nativo

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She now wonders what she does now that she’s lost her rent-controlled place. “Now you’ve got 30,000 evacuees who are going to fight for overpriced, exorbitant rentals,” she says.

Nativo does have a spot where she keeps an RV as her office for her nonprofit,Preston’s Planet Foundation, named for her late pooch, Preston. And a van dubbed Gidget where she could live with her dog if worse comes to worse.

Laura Nativo and dog Delilah.Laura Nativo

All of the photos and the mementos, she says, “That told the story of my hard work and my hustle and my sacrifice through the years and all of the little treasures that would’ve painted a picture of who I am to my future child.”

“You say like, ‘Oh, it’s just stuff. Who cares? You can find more stuff,’ And I totally believe that,” Nativo says.

“But then last night I was at Nordstrom Rack looking for underwear, and I just broke down hysterical while looking at gray sweatpants because I thought about gray sweatpants that I loved at home that were cheap, but they fit really well,” she continues. “It takes years to curate all the material things that fit and make you feel comfortable — and then when all of a sudden you’re faced with starting over and then the grief of the irreplaceable things, it’s so tough.”

“People don’t understand that the heart of L.A. are artists and dreamers and creatives. Everyone who has landed in L.A. has a story,” she says. “They don’t realize that there are real people like me who work hard, who are the L.A. middle class.”

But they are also people who have the drive to come back from the tragedy. “I’m damn resilient and we will rebuild,” Nativo says.

Amid everything, she says, “I go through just shock and hysteria and then dark humor, gratitude. It’s like every emotion of the sun and trying to remind myself that I am alive and my dog is alive — and that, ultimately, I have a lot more than thousands of people right now. So I’m okay.”

Click hereto learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.

source: people.com