Heroes: Jim Grant Braves Inferno (page 2 of 2)

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."

From Reader's Digest - October 2008

 

• Heroes
• • Amazing People

• Everyday Heroes: Taking the Plunge
• How trapeze instructors Jonah Spear and Paul Cannon saved a drowning man.
• 
• A Key Witness Dares to Tell the Truth
• A cabdriver caught up in the Duke University rape case dares to tell the truth. He was selected as the Hero of the Year in 2007.
• 
• Two Men Rescue a Mother and Child
• Two men brave an icy river to rescue a mother and child.
•