When He Saw the Burning Mountain and a Woman Stranded with Her Four Dogs, He Did Something Unbelievable…

As flames consumed the Pacific Palisades, a man risked everything, driving into thick smoke and flying embers to rescue a woman and her four dogs.

On the night of January 7, Los Angeles-based producer Caleb Serban-Lawler found himself on the front lines of the Palisades Fire—the largest wildfire raging across Southern California. What began as an effort to protect homes turned into a daring life-or-death rescue.

“I spent the first half of the day watering roofs with neighbors, trying to keep the fire at bay,” Serban-Lawler tells PEOPLE exclusively. As night fell, the situation worsened, forcing him to leave—until a desperate woman ran up to his truck, pleading for help. Her car wouldn’t start, trapping her and her dogs as flames closed in.

“All I could do was imagine my own mother,” he recalls.

Serban-Lawler later shared unedited footage of the rescue on Instagram. The video shows him asking if she’s okay before she explains that her car, parked in the garage, won’t start. Without hesitation, he agrees to help, and the two race back up the mountain, navigating through blinding smoke and falling embers. Fires rage on both sides of the road as they make their way to her house.

Upon arrival, they quickly load her four dogs into his truck, all while her neighbor’s house is already ablaze. As they speed back down the mountain, the devastation is clear—burning trees, charred vehicles, and an apocalyptic glow in the distance.

Serban-Lawler recalls transferring three of the dogs to another vehicle. “A reporter let me put three of the dogs in her car while we rearranged one,” he posted on Instagram, explaining that one of the dogs didn’t get along with the others. Fortunately, the woman and her pets safely relocated to a friend’s home after the rescue.

Shaken but grateful, the woman later expressed her disbelief. “I don’t know how you drove; you couldn’t see anything,” she tells him in the video. “I thought I was going to die. Thank you so much.”

Despite her praise, Serban-Lawler remains humble. “She kept saying I saved her life, that she would have died with her dogs if I hadn’t helped,” he says. “But I don’t see myself as a hero. I just did what anyone should do.”

The woman, who chose to remain anonymous, later shared her side of the story on social media, revealing that she had been packed and ready to flee when her car suddenly died—leaving her stranded with no help from 911.

“No one was around or allowed in,” she wrote, describing how she ran down the hill in panic and spotted a truck just as it was making a U-turn. Desperate, she slammed her hands on the car to stop it.

“If it hadn’t been for him, my four dogs and I would have died,” she wrote. “We will be forever grateful to a true hero, Caleb @calebserbanlawler, who just happened to be volunteering on that horrific day. 💕🙏”