Just doing his job. (The Goodness of America).

Washington, D.C., firefighter John Turner joined the department as a cadet in 1987. On August 3rd of this year, he nearly lost his life while helping to evacuate residents of a burning apartment building in northwest Washington. The 10-story, 227-unit facility housed about 200 handicapped residents, 24 of whom were wheelchair-bound. Reporting for the August 10th Washington Times, Matthew Cella recounted Turner's heroic efforts.

Turner was working Overtime on ambulance duty and had just dropped off a patient at a hospital, when he and his partner, EMT Sharon Moore, noticed smoke rising from the apartment building shortly after 8 p.m. They rushed to the facility and, despite a lack of protective gear, entered the building to locate and evacuate residents. Climbing to the sixth floor, Turner began banging on apartment doors. When there were no responses, he ran to the next floor, where he found an elderly woman whom he helped to escape.

Turner re-entered the building and made his way once again to the sixth floor. His experience had taught him that when some individuals are asleep, they fail to respond to an initial knock, and that others may opt to lock their doors and stay in their apartments during afire. He "had to feel his way along the 'pitch-dark' hallway, where he stumbled upon an elderly woman two doors from where the fire had started." The woman did not want to leave, but Turner "pulled her to the floor, and they tried to crawl out." He lost his way, but when he began calling for help "a police officer heard him and shined his flashlight on the exit sign." Turner carried the woman down the stairs and out of the building. He told Cella that he was as intent on saving the woman as if she had been his own mother or grandmother. "That was the first thing on my mind. I wasn't going to let this lady stay up there. If we had to die, we were going to die together." She survived and was later reported to be in fair condition at a nearby med ical facility.

Turner then went into the burning building a third time, and while helping fire crews spread hose to the sixth floor was overcome by the heat and smoke. Superheated air burned his lungs, but he did not immediately realize the gravity of his condition. "My chest was hurting me real bad, but I didn't realize it until the fourth time I got down the steps," he told Cella, attributing it to an adrenaline rush.

Emergency crews on the scene recognized that his injuries were more serious than those of any of the evacuated residents. "I kept asking how the ladies were," Turner recalls. "They said, 'They're all right. Just worry about yourself now.'"

He was taken to the same medical facility as the elderly lady he had rescued, where he fell unconscious until the afternoon of August 5th. Expected to make a full recovery, he was in fair condition, still on oxygen therapy, when interviewed by Celia a few days later.

According to Alan Etter, spokesman for Washington's Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, an improperly discarded tobacco product started the fire, which caused $60,000 in damage. Etter praised firefighter Turner, asserting that "there is at least one person who is alive based on what he did." For his part, Turner says, "I just know I did my job. That was good enough for me."