The Best Humanity Has to Offer’: Stranded Owners Watch in Helpless Terror as Reporter Breaks In to Save Three Dogs From Raging Wildfire
The air above the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles was thick with acrid smoke and the ominous glow of a thousand raging furnaces. The Palisades Fire, a destructive force swallowing nearly 23,000 acres, was indifferent to property, status, or life. It was a chaotic, devastating scene that brought seasoned firefighters and first responders to their knees. But for one family, the Pasinettis, the unfolding disaster was not just the loss of their home—it was the prospect of losing their three beloved rescue dogs, Alma, Archie, and Hugo.
Their personal tragedy was compounded by impossible distance and paralyzing helplessness. Andrea Pasinetti was in San Francisco for work, while his wife, Sixuan, was overseas. They were glued to the news, watching in horror as the flames crept toward their house on Lachman Lane. Their dogsitter, bless her heart, was physically unable to breach the police and fire blockades that had sealed off the entire area. The dogs—anxious, terrified, and completely alone—were trapped inside a structure that was, minute by agonizing minute, becoming their funeral pyre.
“It’s this feeling of helplessness and devastation and also just the unknown,” Andrea later recounted, describing the agonizing cocktail of emotions as he jumped on a flight back to LA, racing against time, fire, and fate. “Wanting to maintain hope, but also kind of bracing for the worst.”
As the fire intensified, Pasinetti and a friend, driving toward the inferno with a car full of fire retardant materials and blankets, quickly realized they were in a losing battle. The police blockades at every intersection were absolute. There was simply no way in. With the clock ticking down and the flames advancing, Pasinetti and his wife came to a heartbreaking, desperate conclusion: they had to find someone already inside the evacuation perimeter.
Through a frantic effort involving social media tags and a lucky connection via a colleague, they found their angel in the chaos: CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti.
Vigliotti and his producer, Christian Duran, were reporting near the fire line. The Pasinettis’ message was a desperate plea from the brink of despair. It wasn’t about a story; it was about life. Alma, Archie, and Hugo—three loyal, loving souls—needed a hero.
What followed was a choice that defines heroism. Vigliotti and Duran, seasoned journalists accustomed to covering danger, decided to become participants in it. They received the coordinates of the home, which, according to Pasinetti, was already “on its last legs” and surrounded by a ring of fire. The journalists, without hesitation, agreed to risk their lives.
The challenge was immense. The house was locked. And the occupants weren’t people who could be coaxed out with a shout—they were three highly anxious rescue dogs, who, as Pasinetti explained, were “pre-wired with a lot of anxiety” and would likely be hidden. Alma was near the entrance, Archie somewhere in the middle, and Hugo, the most frightened, was likely hunkered down under a bed in the primary bedroom.
Pasinetti, knowing the rescue team didn’t have a key, gave them a gut-wrenching command that symbolized the depth of his desperation and faith: “Break whatever window he could.”
Vigliotti and Duran navigated the smoking, burning landscape to reach the home. The reporters, in a stunning act of bravery and compassion, followed through on the instructions, smashing a window to gain entry. Stepping into a house already being consumed by fire is an act of courage few can fathom, but the commitment to saving those three innocent lives superseded all fear.
Inside, the environment was suffocating, disorienting, and dangerously hot. The air was thick with smoke, and the sounds of the roaring blaze outside were deafening. The search was a race against the structural integrity of the home. They first found Alma near the entrance, successfully wrangling the terrified pup, perhaps using a blanket to cover her and soothe her fear.
Then came Archie, and finally, the most challenging rescue: Hugo. Just as Pasinetti had predicted, the dog was hiding in the primary bedroom. Retrieving an anxious dog from under a heavy piece of furniture during an active fire is a grueling task, but the team managed to lift the bed and safely extract the final, scared animal.
The immense pressure of the moments was palpable. Every second was stolen from the fire. They successfully loaded all three dogs—Alma, Archie, and Hugo—into their vehicle and drove them away from the swirling vortex of the fire, away from the tree line that the flames were rapidly advancing toward. The three pups, now safe, represented a victory of compassion over catastrophe.
The phone call that followed was the emotional climax of the entire ordeal. Vigliotti reached Pasinetti with the news he had been praying for, but almost too afraid to believe.
“Jonathan called and said, ‘We have the dogs,’” Pasinetti recalled. His first, stunned reaction was, “All three?”
The relief was instantaneous, overwhelming, and absolute. “I have never felt that mixture of joy, and relief, and exhaustion, and despair, and gratitude towards someone,” he shared. The gratitude was for the sheer, profound risk these two strangers had taken. They didn’t save a possession; they saved family.
The gravity of their actions became stunningly clear just hours later. The Pasinettis’ house, the very structure Vigliotti and Duran had broken into to save the dogs, burned to the ground. The timing of the rescue was a razor-thin miracle. Had the journalists hesitated, or had the owners’ desperate plea been delayed by mere minutes, the story would have had a tragic ending.
This act of selfless bravery has since become a powerful symbol of hope amid widespread destruction. Pasinetti reflected on the incredible character shown by the journalists, and indeed, by the first responders and firefighters who tirelessly fought the flames.
“Three dogs who were probably, you know, scared out of their wits and confronted with folks they’d never seen. And they navigated the situation incredibly deftly and bravely,” Pasinetti noted, adding that the generosity, kindness, and risk they put themselves through to get the dogs was “the best that humanity has to offer.”
While the Pasinetti family, like thousands of others, now faces the daunting task of picking up the pieces after losing a home—a monumental, emotional burden—they are grounded by the knowledge that the most important part of their life was saved. The story of Alma, Archie, and Hugo, and the two heroic journalists who defied an inferno to save them, serves as a poignant reminder that in the face of disaster, the things we value most are not walls or material possessions, but the irreplaceable lives—human and animal—that make life worth living. The incredible bond shared between humans and their animals was honored that day by two brave souls who saw life where others saw only ash. The true miracle was not that the dogs survived the fire, but that the spirit of selfless compassion survived the chaos.
