Fire Rescue Hero

When Jim Grant spotted black smoke billowing out of a San Diego apartment building on his way to work, he stopped his car to dial 911, then did something totally out of character: The contractor circled back to take another look. "I know firefighters and police don't like lookie-loos," he says, "so I never do that." But for some reason that day, Grant made a U-turn.

Pulling up to the three-story building, Grant was surprised to find bystanders on the sidewalk but no firefighters. Flames were shooting out of a second-floor window.

On the second floor, he opened the door to an 80-foot hallway. "It was hotter than hades in there and black with smoke," Grant says. "The smell from the burning wires and the foam and the plastic was just horrible." He crisscrossed the hallway, kicking and banging on each apartment door. Fire alarms were going off, and the sound of flames roared from the end unit. "Get out!" Grant hollered over the din. No one responded, and he assumed the residents had already escaped.

Reaching the end of the long hallway, though, Grant noticed that the door to No. 87 was open a crack. He kicked it wide open, finding a startled woman in a motorized wheelchair with a ten-year-old boy at her side and a tiny infant in her arms. "You have to get out of here right now! This building's on fire!" he screamed. The woman, Maria Catlett, looked at him in confusion and said something about getting her crutches and changing clothes.

"You have to go right now!" he insisted. Catlett stayed put. Grant, a fit 52-year-old who bikes daily around the bay, could scarcely breathe. He scooped up the baby and grabbed the boy by the collar, yelling, "C'mon! You're going with me!"

The smoke was getting thicker by the second, stinging his eyes and searing his throat. Grant was terrified that the baby would die of smoke inhalation if he didn't get her out fast. He clutched the tiny body to his chest, wrapping his jacket around her, then bolted down the hallway, dragging the little boy alongside. Safely outside, Grant handed the infant to an onlooker and turned to the boy, Hubert Catlett. "You stay with this guy," he said. "I'm going back up to get your mom."

Grant retraced his steps through the hellish passage, kicking the apartment doors-"just in case"-as he made his way back to the disabled woman's apartment. He found her in the bathroom, changing from her pajamas into jeans. "You have to leave here right now!" Grant shouted.†

Catlett still refused, insisting she had to get dressed. Grant could feel his chest tightening, "until my lungs felt like the size of walnuts" as he fought for air. I've tried twice now to rescue her, he told himself. I can't do any more, because I can't breathe, and I'm going to die.†

"And I left," he says. "I left."

Only five minutes or so had passed since Grant had called 911. He assumed rescuers with oxygen masks would be there any second.†

Back in her apartment, Maria Catlett was trying to hurry. "But in a moment like that, you get confused," the 37-year-old native of Mexico says. She knew that her spinal deformity-coupled with pain from the C-section she'd had just a month earlier when her baby, Joanna, was born-meant she was unlikely to make it out on her own. Her husband, Hubert Sr., a Navy cook, had been deployed to Iraq just days before. She felt overwhelmed. "I couldn't breathe, and my head was aching," she recalls.

A spokesperson for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department says that the first 911 call came in at 7:36 a.m., and the first unit arrived on the scene at 7:40. But when Grant got outside, the only help in sight was a young police officer, Caleb Knobel. Grant told him about the woman on the second floor.

"Will you take me?" Knobel asked.

"Let's go," said Grant, who'd caught his breath and was ready to venture in a third time.

"By now, the hallway was pretty dark," Grant recalls. "And it was hotter than it was the first two times. And a lot smokier. We ran down the hallway, and you remember the scene from Field of Dreams when the players kind of appear out of the cornfield and then disappear back into it? Well, that's what we saw when we got near the end of the hall-she appeared out of a big, thick cloud of black smoke in her wheelchair, racing toward us."

The three barreled to the stairwell, and the two men lifted Catlett out of her wheelchair and took her down to her waiting children. Then they went back up and carried out the wheelchair.

No one was injured in the December 11 fire, which was caused by a damaged electrical cord. The Catlett family, though, lost everything and moved into military housing. "I know it was very, very dangerous to stay behind," says Maria, "but I wasn't thinking clearly. I realize now I could have died."†

The Catletts weren't the only ones Grant saved that day. "I hear from tenants all the time, saying, 'If it weren't for that guy banging on my door that morning, I wouldn't have known,'" says apartment manager Luis Leguizamo.

Grant and Knobel were honored by the San Diego Burn Institute in May for their courage. A handsome plaque and his watch-frozen at 7:37, when he broke it banging on apartment doors-aren't the only reminders Grant has of that fateful U-turn. "To this day," he says, "just thinking about the fire, I get that taste in my mouth."†

Author Unknown