Video shows family, not looters, retrieving items from their wildfire-damaged California home

California officials have warned of looting amid the Los Angeles wildfires and local officials have announced several arrests of looters.

But one video shared widely on social media that claims to show Black men looting items from a home does not show that at all.

A video posted on Instagram Jan. 9 showed a young man in a navy Nike hoodie with what looked like a white, cloth bag slung over his shoulder as he walked down a street away from a muted green home. Flames and smoke rose in the background. The video then cut to images of three other men carrying a big-screen television set out of the same house.

"Fires and looting," the post’s caption said. "A regular Democrat run city. There’s nothing to see here."

We found multiple social media posts sharing the same video, some on X had a community note attached that said the people in the video were helping a family member, not looting. The note linked to an Instagram video showing a KTLA news reporter interviewing a homeowner.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

Using the words on that news report’s chyron — "Deadly Eaton fire burns 10,600+ acres in San Gabriel Valley" — we traced the interview using TV Eyes, a media monitoring site, to KTLA’s Jan. 8 live coverage of the fires. We also found that video on KTLA’s YouTube page.

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In that video, KTLA reporter Chip Yost said, "Basically, the folks who live here and their friends emptied this house out of a bunch of their stuff just in case the fire got here," as the camera panned across the street to show items, some in white bags, on a sidewalk. Included was a blue, wheeled trash bin, like the one seen in the background of posts claiming to show a looter carrying a white bag.

The camera returned to Yost, who was standing in front of a green home in Altadena that looked like the one seen in the Instagram video and was purportedly looted. He interviewed a woman who said she lived there with her three children.

At one point, the camera panned to the woman’s house, showing a street address of 161. That’s the same house address that showed on the front of the house in the Instagram post that said it showed looting. In the original TV report, a young man wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and light-colored pants walked out of the house — attire that matched that worn by the person carrying the white bag at the introduction of the Instagram video that claimed it showed looting. "That’s my son," the woman told Yost.

Yost asked about the people who helped her retrieve her belongings. 

"My brothers work for the city of Pasadena," she said. The camera panned to a group of men and women standing a few feet away. One man wearing a red sweatshirt and pants, a wool cap and a face mask appears to be the same man seen carrying a TV out of the house in the posts that claimed to show looters.

The KTLA video did not show the men carrying the items out of the home. We contacted KTLA and Yost for comment but an editor there said the team was too busy covering the fires to immediately comment.

Looting has been a real problem during the Los Angeles wildfires. California Attorney General Rob Bonta vowed to hold looters accountable, and Gov. Gavin Newsom deployed the state’s National Guard to aid law enforcement. Officials have arrested multiple people for looting in wildfire-damaged areas, including one man dressed as a firefighter, news reports said.

But this Instagram post showed family members and friends helping a fire victim and her family retrieve items from a fire-damaged home. We rate the claim the video shows looters Pants on Fire!