Steve Guttenberg says he broke into an elderly couple’s home and carried them out during the 2025 Palisades fire, describing a chaotic rescue that came as flames closed in on the coastal enclave west of Los Angeles.
On a Monday episode of Maury Povich’s new On Par podcast, the 30-year Palisades resident said a friend texted him that an elderly couple was in their house and not leaving. Guttenberg said he took somebody else’s car because his own was far down the street and he could not find it, then drove up to the home and knocked on the window. “You got to leave, the fire is coming,” he recalled telling them.
He said the warning did not work. Guttenberg said he had to break into the house through a window, fell onto the kitchen floor with glass everywhere, unlocked the door and picked the couple up so he could carry them outside and let a fire truck get to them. “That’s why I’m here, call the cops. You’ve got to leave!” he said he told them.
The rescue adds a blunt, personal detail to a fire that destroyed upwards of 6,800 structures and helped drive loss estimates from the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire as high as $164 billion. Guttenberg previously told Entertainment Weekly that the fire got so close that “everybody was trying to get out” and it became “sort of a little bit of a panic.” He also said he started moving abandoned cars so emergency vehicles could get through the streets.
That is the contradiction at the heart of the story: even as one neighbor was trying to clear a path for emergency crews, another household was still refusing to leave until Guttenberg forced the issue. He said the couple hated him after the rescue attempt and that the woman hit him in the head, but he still pushed them out because the house was going to burn down. In his telling, the lesson was the one he repeated on the podcast: in a crisis, people have to remember they are part of a community.
The 2025 Palisades fire was part of the broader Los Angeles wildfire emergency that also included the Eaton fire, and many famous figures lost their homes in the fires. Guttenberg’s account now stands as one of the clearest firsthand descriptions of how fast that emergency turned from evacuation warning to a door-by-door fight to get people out alive.
