Max Meier staying positive after California fires leave him homeless

Last Tuesday started as a typical day for 2026 defensive end Max Meier at Los Angeles Loyola as coaches stopped by to recruit him and he was particularly excited to meet USC’s Lincoln Riley.

It would end up being a nightmare only hours later as the Pacific Palisades native learned about the raging inferno that was leveling his tiny beach community that’s sandwiched between Malibu and Santa Monica, an event that would forever change his life.

A week later, the Palisades fire is still scorching the area, residents are on high alert because of blaring Santa Ana winds that refuse to relent and Meier finds himself sleeping on a far-too-small couch in an Airbnb in Hermosa Beach because his family home – and all those memories – are rubble.

“I was talking to some coaches who came by the school to talk to me and some other players,” Meier said of last Tuesday. “One of my best friends comes up to me and says, ‘There’s a fire in the Palisades, we all have to go home and evacuate.’

“I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me. You’re exaggerating.’ I didn’t have my phone and all my friends left but I had to stay because Lincoln Riley was coming by at lunch to talk to some of us and Brandon Lockhart is committed and I just wanted to meet him because it’s USC.

“I actually didn’t get home. All my friends didn’t grab a lot of stuff but they grabbed some stuff but I didn’t grab anything. I was at school. About 120 kids from the Palisades got called to the office and we all had to call our parents and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re getting evacuated,’ so I was going to go home.

“After Lincoln Riley, I went home. I was going to go home, but I saw another kid who is from Pasadena, he was asking what was going on and I told him the Palisades was on fire. Little did I know his house was going to burn down, too. It was just nuts.”

The Palisades Fire was tearing through Meier’s neighborhood in the hills above Palisades Charter High leaving just ashes in its wake. His friend’s house was being engulfed by the Eaton Fire, another massive blaze centered in Altadena, about 16 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Former four-star receiver Jamire Calvin was spotlighted on 60 Minutes on Sunday night because his house was lost in the fire, his aunt dying in the flames next door.

Meier, the 2026 defensive end with offers from Arizona, Arizona State, Illinois, Kansas, Northwestern (an offer he landed days after the fire burned down his home), Washington, Wisconsin and others, attempted to make it back to Pacific Palisades but the traffic from his school to his house was total gridlock.

Everyone was fleeing – the Pacific Coast Highway jammed, the side streets clogged.

Meier’s parents – who were in the middle of evacuating through that hellscape – told their son to go somewhere, anywhere else. Meier said it would have taken him five hours to make it the 17 miles from his school to Pacific Palisades, if he could even get in.

“My parents had to ditch their cars,” Meier said. “My parents were like, ‘Do not come to the Palisades, go wherever.’

“So I go and stay with my best friend. They got a room at (the Los Angeles Country Club). I stayed there for a night. I couldn’t even get to my parents, it was going to be like five hours. It would have taken way too long but they got to another hotel.”

By Wednesday morning, a Loyola football teammate gave Meier some clothes, almost all of his burned up back in the Palisades. The friends he stayed with Tuesday night decamped to other family in Huntington Beach and Meier reunited with his parents, who were now desperately searching for a house to rent until … who knows?

The Meier family hastily rented a home in Manhattan Beach for two years but they’re currently staying in an Airbnb a few miles away in Hermosa Beach until everything settles.

“I’m sleeping on a four-foot couch for this next week … and I’m 6-5 and a half, so it doesn’t really work out well,” Meier said. “We went to donation centers at Loyola to get clothes. There are so many people helping out here. We got groceries, I got a free suitcase, free clothes. I apologize when people are giving me stuff because I feel like I don’t deserve it but I realize it’s the situation I’m in so it’s kind of gnarly.”

A few days ago, in a bit of gallows humor or to show his resilient spirit, Meier returned to Pacific Palisades, hopped three fences and went back to where his home once stood.

Maybe he had to see it. Maybe Meier just wanted to be home again. The big defensive end who will play FBS college football found his burned-out weight bench, sat on it and playfully pumped out a few reps. He was being a kid again.

“I’m a very humorous guy,” Meier said. “I’m trying to be on TV one day as a sports commentator so I have humor, it’s like my whole family. If you don’t have humor in this time the only other emotion is sadness so I’d rather make some jokes although I am sad and it’s devastating, I like to make some jokes to make people feel better.

“I got some texts and they said that video made their day and they haven’t laughed in a while.”

When his parents were fleeing the flames, they grabbed the birth certificates and the passports. The car survived. But all of Meier’s football awards, all his accomplishments, his recruiting letters, his memories, are gone.

For him, for thousands in the Palisades and other pockets of Los Angeles, everything is just … gone.

“Everything just burned down,” Meier said.