NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff didn’t know what to expect when he turned his SUV onto the Pacific Palisades street where he grew up.
What he found on Wednesday were smoldering ruins where his childhood home had stood. Only the remnants of a chimney and brick wall remained. It was among the countless number of buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles-area wildfires, where Soboroff is one of many journalists covering the story — and living it.
His own tale, told across several NBC News platforms Wednesday and Thursday, broke the so-called “fourth wall” and gave viewers an intimate experience of what the tragedy felt like.
“I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a human without my own thoughts and feelings,” Soboroff said in an interview on Thursday. “It would almost be a disservice to hide the emotions about what I’ve seen.”
At first, the camera caught him staring blankly and trying to process. “This is the first time I’ve seen the house I grew up in and I really don’t know what to say,” he told viewers. Getting out of the vehicle, he pulled out his phone to FaceTime his mother about what had become of the house that he and four siblings lived in until he was 10.
Even if it came as a surprise to Soboroff, it probably wasn’t to viewers as they had watched him drive through the community, devastation all around him.
“What I’ve seen here is what I would have expected from an earthquake,” he said in the interview. “This is what the Big One would have looked like. Not a fire. We’ve had fires before.”
Soboroff, 41, lives now in a house near Dodger Stadium with his wife and two children. Everyone is safe, and the house is untouched, he said.
Some journalists weren’t so lucky. Ryan Pearson, an entertainment video manager at The Associated Press, covered the fire all day Wednesday before finding that his home in Altadena had burned to the ground. Fire spared the home of Fox News’ Jonathan Hunt in West L.A., but his daughter’s high school was partially burned. Other reporters, like KCAL’s Rick Montanez, broke down on the air while describing some of what they were seeing.
Soboroff has alternated reporting with personal missions this week. Since telling the story of his childhood home, several people reached out to ask him to check on their own homes, and he’s tried to fulfill requests when he can. He went to see if a plaque honoring his father for helping build a local park was still visible. It was.
He doesn’t know who was living now in the home where he grew up, but is trying to find out and reach them.
“For me it was my memories,” he said. “But for them, it was the house they lived in.”
