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Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki/Redux
"Call 911 and get me a sharp knife," Dr. Rob Boll yelled. He’d just sat down at his church’s annual dinner when an elderly woman began choking on a piece of turkey. Her family tried the Heimlich and failed. He tried too. The woman was turning blue. That’s when the family practitioner asked for the knife—and out of nowhere, one of the diners produced a switchblade. Boll had never performed a tracheotomy, but he didn’t hesitate.
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Photographed by Steven G. Smith
On 9/11, after watching the horror of the falling towers on TV in her Montana home, Shannen Rossmiller was so enraged, she began a new career—scanning jihadist sites on the Internet. She studied Arabic and posed as a member of Al Qaeda to entice would-be terrorists in e-mail exchanges.
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Photo by Vern Evans
As he came to a railroad crossing near Santa Clarita, California, Cruz Caldera saw two women struggling to move a camper off the tracks. The pin that held their rig had fallen out, and the trailer was stuck. While dozens of drivers steered around the women, Caldera, a city zoning officer, stopped. He knew a commuter train was coming in 15 minutes.
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"Hello," JJ Justiss bellowed, "anybody there?" He could hear gas hissing as he squirmed through the tangled steel and crushed cinder blocks of an indoor entertainment complex called the Fun Zone. Minutes earlier, a tornado had ripped through Montgomery, Alabama, and teachers and kids from a nursery school next door were trapped in the game area. They’d tried to protect the children by taking cover in a plastic ball play pit—even shielding the kids with their own bodies.
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At the bottom of frozen Idaho Falls on the Snake River, Terek Beckman and Steven Haws spotted a white SUV turned upside down. A woman was standing neck-deep in the frigid water, holding a child. Instinctively, both men went to the rescue, scrambling over a guardrail and crawling across the ice. They could hear the current moving under the frozen surface as they approached the two.
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Judith Schmidt was thinking about her upcoming wedding as she ducked into her car after work one night. Then a hooded man in a black ski mask holding a ten-inch serrated knife came at her. "Get over, and give me the keys," he said. Schmidt put up a fight and screamed. Behind the wheel of his car, co-worker Ted Lidgett noticed the commotion and went to help. "I’ll cut her throat," the attacker yelled.
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Mark Maksimowicz was haunted by the memory of the once pristine Tampa Bay he knew as a boy—and decided to do something about it. He quit his job, bought a flat-bottom boat and later talked three other family members into helping him fish the bay. Not for snook or grouper—but for what careless fishermen and a wasteful society had left behind.
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"Stop them!" a pedestrian yelled. "They stole a lady’s purse!" Kevin Croskey and a dozen fellow landscape workers in Independence, Missouri, took off after two young men. The boys were quick, but the landscapers were well conditioned. They encircled the teens. It was a weird experience for Croskey. Two weeks before, he’d run down three men suspected of robbing a Quiznos shop.
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A man was lying on the sidewalk of Memphis’s busy Lamar Avenue, frantically kicking at two dogs. Zohnn Griggs made a quick U-turn across six lanes and blasted his horn. His headlights illuminated 58-year-old James Chapple, Jr., screaming as two pit bulls mauled him. Griggs grabbed a pipe lying on the ground. The male dog, a huge animal, went for him.
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Photograhped by Erik Butler
"Libba Phillips’s sister vanished. Addicted to drugs, afflicted by mental problems, the young woman fell through society’s safety net and disappeared on the mean streets of Tampa. Phillips searched for five years before she finally found her. In the process, she discovered the startling statistics: There are about 108,000 missing people and at least a million runaways.
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And our 2008 Hero the Year is...Moezeldin Elmostafa
Shortly after midnight on March 14, 2006, Moezeldin Elmostafa, a taxi driver, drove two young men to Duke University. A month later, he got a call to testify for one of three Duke lacrosse players charged with sexually assaulting an exotic dancer. Elmostafa had so much at risk. What would happen to him if he did testify?
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Shortly after midnight on March 14, 2006, Moezeldin Elmostafa, a taxi driver, drove two young men to Duke University. A month later, he got a call to testify for one of three Duke lacrosse players charged with sexually assaulting an exotic dancer. Elmostafa had so much at risk. What would happen to him if he did testify?
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those who have qualities of a HERO, never worry what would be the outcome of any such incident but they would rather work overtime to help the victims of any kind of disasters but the sorry picture of the story is that such people are often misuderstood ,misguided and mistreated by those who are helped as a human being