High School Abuzz With News of Student’s Heroic Rescue of Girl, 8, in Pool

Word about Rolando Avalos’ deed ran through the school grapevine before reaching his principal’s ears.

“His former counselor at Sepulveda Junior High . . . called me up to inform me,” Principal Joan Elam of Monroe High School said Thursday. “So I went out and found Rolando in class and talked to him and confirmed it.”

The mustached, 16-year-old sophomore had saved a child’s life.

On Sept. 17, Rolando was paddling leisurely in the pool at his Sepulveda apartment complex when he felt an electric shock and then another, caused by a short-circuited pool light.

Scrambling to dry ground, Rolando shouted at a half-dozen children in the pool. But an 8-year-old girl, Lourdes Becerra, stayed motionless in the water, her hand clutching the pool’s edge.

He grabbed her arm and hauled her out. “It was like taking a stick out of the water,” he said. Her eyes had rolled upward and her breathing had stopped.

Rolando administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation--the first time he had used the technique he learned in three years of summer camp, he said. Soon, Lourdes resumed breathing on her own. She was taken to a hospital and was released later in the evening.

Her rescuer, a self-effacing lad, “was very quiet and very modest about it,” Elam said.

Since then, though, Rolando has become something of a school hero, receiving a formal letter of commendation from Elam and having his name up in lights. This week the school marquee read: “Monroe honors Rolando Avalos for saving a child’s life.”

“I’m sure he did not expect that to happen,” Elam said of the student who harbors a dream of becoming a professional football player. “But he’s a very special young man.”