Police Praised for Helping Save Woman From Burning House

The Huntington Park police officers were on a routine traffic call when the report of a nearby house fire crackled over the radio. A few minutes later they found themselves staring up a dark stairway filled with roaring flames and billowing clouds of greasy black smoke.

“My wife is trapped upstairs. You’ve got to save her,” said badly burned Nick Bejarano, who had collapsed on the stairs.

Equipped with only a garden hose, Officers Al Amador and Neil Castelli climbed the stairs and held down the flames until Los Angeles firefighters arrived to drag Valerie Bejarano to safety.

On Friday, both officers were hailed as heroes. In an instant, fire authorities said, the capricious forces of that house fire could have easily killed them.

Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Dale Gain said Amador and Castelli did not fully understand the odds they faced when they climbed the stairs Thursday night with no protective gear and no oxygen masks to shield them from the smoke, “which can get you in a few seconds.”

“It’s very difficult. And a room can get so hot it ignites all at once, and that can kill everybody in it,” Gain said. “They took quite a chance. They were on the ball. And they acted.”

“We are extremely proud of these two men here,” said Huntington Park Police Lt. Tom Weselis.

Valerie Bejarano, 50, was in extremely critical condition Friday at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. Authorities suspect she accidentally started the fire by dropping a lighted cigarette while smoking in bed, but arson experts are still investigating.

Her husband, 59, was in stable condition after being airlifted to the Burn Center at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, authorities said.

Amador and Castelli emerged from the house coughing and vomiting from smoke inhalation, Castelli said, and were treated at a hospital and released.

When Amador finally got home early Friday morning, the first thing his wife noticed was the heavy scent of smoke saturating his clothes and hair.

“She smelled me first,” he said. “She wanted to know if I’d been smoking cigars again.”

That’s when Amador, 41, a 13-year veteran of the force, told her the story.

Moved by Nick Bejarano’s desperate pleas to save his wife, he and Castelli called out to Valerie Bejarano, who was lying unconscious on the bedroom floor upstairs.

“No one answered,” Amador said. The only sounds were the eerie roar and crackle of the fire. “We feared she was deceased. But the man kept telling me his wife was trapped there. He begged us to get her.”

“We felt pretty helpless,” Amador said. “We couldn’t do anything without water.”

That’s when they made a split-second decision to use a garden hose to fight the flames. The Bejaranos didn’t have one, so Castelli, 29, ran next door and dragged the neighbor’s hose over and handed it up to Amador.

They were lucky; it was a long hose.

Amador led the way, gingerly climbing the stairs, spraying blindly into the thick smoke enveloping him. His eyes stung in the darkness and his senses were enveloped by the acrid smell of burning plastic.

“We were pretty close” to Bejarano, Amador said. “But it was so dark and filled with smoke we didn’t see her.”

At one point, Amador thought he had extinguished the flames altogether in the bedroom where Bejarano lay.

But when he lowered the hose, the fire flared up again.

Amador concentrated on keeping the flames down until the Los Angeles Country Fire Department units arrived and rescued Bejarano.

Even if they had had time to consider the dangers, the officers said, it might not have mattered.

“We were just too pumped up,” Amador said. “We were just doing everything automatically. We weren’t thinking about our emotions. It’s just a human reaction.

“I would hope everyone would do the same thing in our place,” he said. “But you never really know what you will do until you’re tested by a situation like that.”