14-year-old California resident Latrell McCockran is being hailed as a hero after he rescued a disabled man and a dog from a burning building on Tuesday.
McCockran was at a friend’s apartment this week when the building caught on fire. Immediately, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and headed towards the smoke. On his way there, he came across a disabled man struggling to get out of his apartment.
“I saw the guy kind of stumble and it was like, ‘he’s out of it, he’s been breathing in all the smoke inhalation,’” McCockran told ABC 7 News.
McCockran helped bring the man out of the apartment and into safety. Once outside, the man told McCockran that his dog was still trapped in the burning building. Without hesitating, the young man ran back inside and rescued the dog.
“He said, ‘Get the dog, the dog.’ So I had to run in there a second time to get the dog, and as I ran in there to get the dog, flames started coming out of the room from the roof and the stuff just started to fall,” McCockran recounted.
McCockran, just a freshman in high school, said it was an easy decision to save the man and his dog.
“I can’t sit there and let somebody die,” he said.
The disabled man, identified as 62-year-old Richard Smith, cannot thank the teenager enough for saving his life.
“Of course, he did save my life because I was going to walk right into the blaze,” Smith said.
