To Save Passport Over Cherished Items

News
  • Laura Nativo, a dog trainer who created a nonprofit to help train service dogs, lost her home in the Los Angeles wildfires
  • She thought her home was safe, telling PEOPLE, “I lived across the street from a fire station”
  • She describes the emotional rollercoaster of evacuating, the devastation of losing her rent-controlled apartment and sentimental items

Dog trainer Laura Nativo thought she had it covered when her local news warned of potential catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area due to hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and fueled by dry vegetation. She felt relatively safe living near the beach with a fire station almost directly across the street from her apartment building.

“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 irreplaceable 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.”

Nativo tells PEOPLE she had prepared for the possibility of evacuation. She even alerted neighbors, especially the elderly and single moms, to prepare to evacuate. She then decided to leave early to get her dogs out of the smoke, leaving her partner, Jason, behind to help others nearby in case the fire got close.

She just never believed it would happen, and happen very 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 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?”

And she thought of all the things one loses. Not the clothing and computers and the material goods, but her “heart dog” Preston’s ashes. The ashes of her baby dog, Penelope, who had just passed from kidney disease. 

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

Laura Nativo


“I had been going through IVF for five years and I had finally gotten pregnant and should have given birth in November, but my baby had a fatal heart condition and I lost him in June,” Natvio says through the tears. “All I had of my son were handprints and footprints from the hospital, and now that’s gone too.”

And she’s haunted by those moments before she left her home, to get her dog, Delilah, and a dog she was training out of the smoky environment before realizing her home would be in the destruction zone.

“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.

But she’s still mourning the loss of things that marked her life’s journey. She says the photos showing her as a 17-year-old kid from Parsippany, N.J. who came to live out her dream in L.A. are all gone. All the photos showing “that era of my life of being this starry-eyed, aspiring actress who became producer, who became this TV dog personality and who now runs a nonprofit.”  

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.”

She says she sees in the media horrific comments from “people who love to hate L.A. and laugh as our city burns.”

“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,” Natvio says.

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



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