How Oreo the dog was rescued from wildfire in L.A.

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. – It was hard to see him through the thick, black smoke – but you could hear him wail.

As flames leaped up and roared down the hills of this coastal community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, flying embers setting lifeguard towers and palm trees on fire, the man wheeled a bicycle through a popular beach parking lot, now filled with dozens of fire trucks, police cruisers and other emergency responders. He was covered in ash, his yellow helmet askew, and he could barely breathe.

He screamed for help, causing a Washington Post reporter and others to get out of their cars and ask what was wrong. That morning, the man said, he had gone to work in the city, and then his town caught fire. He had left his dogs at home, and officials wouldn’t let him get close. So he rented a bike and tried to enter through a back way, but there was fire.

“I need my dogs. They’re my family,” he sobbed, repeating his address to a firefighter who was taking notes.

One dog was “behavioral,” he cried, and needed special assistance. The interaction is just one example of what often happens in sudden, fast-moving disasters: People unexpectedly have to evacuate, or aren’t home, and pets get left behind. It was “heartbreaking,” the reporter wrote on X, sharing a clip of the stranger’s story.

It went viral. A few days later, a woman reached out and said the man was a good childhood friend. His name is Casey Colvin, and he had an incredible saga searching for his dog Oreo.

The Post interviewed a half-dozen people, who told their stories through sporadic coughs, and has reconstructed what happened after that first interaction in the parking lot: a five-day rescue mission that aligned an incredible cast of characters from across the country, paired them up with celebrities, all with the sole mission of rescuing a small spitfire of a dog that, for much of its life, nobody had wanted.

Nobody except Colvin.

Into the fire

For a long time, Oreo survived by eating feces. He had been heavily abused and abandoned, and spent most of his time outside, Colvin learned when he first met Oreo at a shelter last summer. When he volunteered to foster the skittish, snappy blond Pomeranian, seven ticks had been “feasting on him” for at least a year and a half, and he had hepatitis.

Colvin, who friends describe as a “kooky and intelligent” salesperson and part-time security guard, said he would keep Oreo until someone else did. After he attacked people who tried to rehome him, Colvin said he realized the dog was meant for him.

“If Casey wasn’t in the picture, this dog certainly would have been euthanized. No shelter would be able to do any kind of attitude adjustment,” said Aaron Christensen, an animal rescuer who helped look for Oreo.

The two became inseparable, Colvin said, and Oreo quickly bonded to Teeka, Colvin’s older black rat terrier. They rarely separated, and Oreo softened and became more trusting. He even handled a big life event pretty well: moving with Colvin’s partner to her multigenerational home in Pacific Palisades six months ago.

On the morning of Jan. 7, the dry Santa Ana winds were howling and nearly bending trees. Colvin was concerned and debated taking the dogs with him to work, but he was only going to be gone for a few hours. Then his world shattered. He started getting reports of flames in the hills above his house. Friends and neighbors texted him about a fast-moving fire. It moved too fast for him to get back. By the time he did, police told him it was too late to retrieve anything of value.

Cal Fire Battalion Chief Brent Pascua met Colvin in the parking lot that evening. He got his address and learned that Oreo was a tough cookie who would only come out if Teeka, now his sister, was going. So the firefighter took off toward the smoke.

Colvin’s house wasn’t on fire just yet, but it was about to be. So Pascua smashed in the glass panel of the front door, reached through and unlocked the handle. The dogs went scurrying under a bed. He was able to grab Teeka, but when he reached for Oreo, “That’s when our showdown happened,” Pascua said.

The little dog snapped at him. Pascua could feel the fire getting closer. He opened the front door and Oreo zipped through and ran right toward the fire.

“I wasn’t really expecting that dog to survive,” Pascua said.

After handing Teeka over to Colvin, the firefighter went back later that night. Colvin’s house “had fire all in and all around it,” he said. The dog was nowhere to be found.

‘We tried’

Colvin went frantic on Facebook. Thanks to his past work as a bodyguard for Kevin Richardson and A.J. McLean of the Backstreet Boys, and the Foo Fighters, as well as security work at the Playboy mansion and a few famous Hollywood clubs, Colvin has some well-connected friends around Los Angeles.

Melissa Carbone, an entrepreneur who once secured the largest deal in “Shark Tank” history, happened to see one of his posts. She reached out to Simone Reyes, an animal rights activist who also happened to once be the longtime assistant of the now-disgraced rap mogul Russell Simmons.

Reyes, who also appeared in multiple Beastie Boys music videos but is now a country musician, quickly become air traffic controller for the rescue mission. She then contacted fellow animal rescuer William McNamara, a former actor who starred in the 1995 film “Copycat” with Sigourney Weaver.

McNamara tapped Aaron Christensen, a former Army medic and search-and-rescue volunteer who sells shipping containers and cooks barbecue. Christensen said Elon Musk recently loaned him a Cybertruck to help save animals in the fire.

“We’ve been inundated with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of leads,” Christensen said. But Oreo’s was different. It was one of those viral animal stories that really grabbed and rallied people, and – “for exposure reasons” – it was a good opportunity to highlight the work, he said.

Thus kicked off a five-day intensive mission that pulled in more than a dozen strangers who became his “dog trackers,” as Colvin calls them, their names listed in his phone as tracker 1, 2, 3 …

At some point, one of Colvin’s friends spotted Oreo, his fur mottled and gray, running up a street near the torched shell of a car, but couldn’t grab him.

McNamara, who said he has been in a cage with grizzly bears and Bengal tigers, put it like this: “I have never been more intimidated than with Oreo.”

On Friday, three days after Oreo ran out of the house, McNamara and Christensen used their credentials to get past the barricades and hunted for Oreo in the rubble that had been Colvin’s house, shouting his name. After 90 minutes, they called it.

“This doesn’t look good, very sorry, we tried,” McNamara said in an Instagram video.

Early Sunday morning, Jane Garrison, another activist, spotted Oreo in some rubble through a pair of binoculars. She alerted the rescuers, one of whom was hustling to evacuate a small farm in Topanga, the canyon right next to the Palisades.

The crew knew that Oreo wouldn’t come to anyone else, so they formed a plan to get Colvin into the fire zone. With the help of NBC reporter Liz Kreutz, Colvin, with Teeka in tow, stood outside of a white metal gate – the only thing left of his neighbor’s house – and gently called for Oreo, squeezing his favorite squeaky toy.

The dog appeared, his tail wagging. He trotted down the driveway, through the bars and into Colvin’s arms. Now-viral footage captured the moment, with Colvin pumping his fist and wailing, but this time out of joy.

Oreo’s survival in the toxic, apocalyptic ruins is extraordinary, but sadly not unique. So far in this disaster, Marc Ching and his group Animal Hope & Wellness say they have rescued or helped more than 600 animals – including pigs, a ram, a pheasant, tortoises, an alpaca and an emu. With police restrictions, there are many more that they still cannot get to.

“They’re all suffering and it’s all terrible,” he said.

Everything is ash

Seven days after Colvin wheeled that bike through the parking lot, he pulled into another, this time in an SUV now filled with everything he owns: donated clothes, bedding and food, and a gray-tinted Oreo yapping in his lap.

He wore a fur-covered Los Angeles Fire Department T-shirt – the department gave it to him – but the same ash-covered pants, which “could stand up and walk themselves,” he joked. He’s slowly coming down from the adrenaline and terror, saying the trauma and “the reality is setting in.” At the grocery store, he started crying over a can of soup, he said, because he thought to himself, “You don’t need this, you just bought 14 cans of soup and they are in your pantry.” Then he remembered, he no longer has a pantry. He no longer has anything.

As someone who works three jobs to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the United States, he has no idea what he and his partner are going to do. They got lucky with her family’s old farm-style home, he said, and it “was the happiest home he’d ever lived in.” His favorite thing about it was the beveled glass front door, the same one the firefighter shattered with a shovel to save Oreo.

“Even the glass is ash now,” he said.

And the crazy thing is, it’s all OK, he said. He’d lose it all again for Oreo.

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Video Embed Code

Video: Casey Colvin, a resident of Pacific Palisades, California, found his white Pomeranian Oreo on Jan. 12 after his home burned in the Palisades Fire.© 2025 , The Washington Post

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