NBC Reporter Holds Back Tears on Finding Childhood Home Burned to the Ground by Raging L.A. Fire

NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff was one among the thousands of people affected by the recent Los Angeles wildfire on Wednesday. Devastating footage from NBC Nightly News visualized the catastrophic damage caused to the nearby neighborhoods of Chautauqua, Sunset Boulevard, and Pacific Palisades–the place Soboroff was born and raised in, engulfed in fire and wreckage. In a segment, the 42-year-old journalist drove through the ruins of his hometown and struggled to hold back his tears looking at his childhood home burned down to ashes. 

“I look around the town, the neighborhood, the place that I grew up in. I talk to my friends, who I spent so much time with on these streets, and it’s hard to imagine what comes next and what happens next,” Soboroff expressed. Eventually, he walked to his childhood home and stood speechless while gaping at the condition of the plot. The house was defaced, the lawn trees burnt and there was not a speck of green grass on the property under the grey-stained sky. A charred vehicle stood on the lawn alongside the ruined home– overall a heartbreaking scene. “I really don’t know what to say,” Soboroff said before he pulled out his phone to FaceTime his mother and show her their memorable house. 

“Oh, I am so sad. Every one of you was born in that house,” his mother, Patti Soboroff could be heard saying from the call. The camera momentarily zoomed into an emotional Jacob with teary eyes, as he silently watched the house with his hands tucked in his pocket. “This is a really, really special place for the Soborff family. And I am very sorry to see it go,” the MSNBC journalist said, adding words of comfort for residents of Pacific Palisades and the greater L.A. area. 

Earlier, Soboroff mentioned that growing up in Pacific Palisades, he witnessed a lot of fires and even had to evacuate the place many times. However, this was the most devastating wildfire he had ever seen during his lifetime, causing the most damage to the “special” coastal neighborhood with each house and infrastructure, from Sunset Boulevard to the Pallisades, burned down to the ground. Community staples like the high school, the Pacific Palisades Public Library, which he called the “pride of the community” and the Will Rogers State Historic Park were all gone, per the reports. “The weight of it all is very, very intense to think about it,” Soboroff said. He even talked to a few of the firefighters, one of whom marked the recent fire as the “topmost devastating” one in his experience of 26 years. 

In a different video posted on Soboroff’s Instagram (@jacobsoboroff), the journalist reported from a place called Palisades Rivera and Palisades Village, with wildfires flaring over Will Rogers Park, seen from his shoulder far away. It is also one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States, per ABC News. Soboroff revealed that the fire had started in a remote area near the Palisades Highlands, comprising a neighborhood of only 500 or about 1,000 homes. The extreme dryness and scare rainfall in the area for the past several months had accounted for the disastrous wildfires that aggressively spread over the larger Los Angeles area. Celebrities like Heidi Montag, Paris Hilton, and Bill Crystal also lost their homes to the LA wildfire.