Valley cops saluted as heroes for dangerous rescue
Published: September 7, 2006
They were partners on the LAPD for only six months when they were forced to face death together.
In a dramatic suicide attempt, a distraught woman tried to hang herself by her bra from the sixth floor of a Sherman Oaks apartment building.
When that failed, she prepared to jump - and she nearly took LAPD Officers Edwin Marron and Mark Mireles with her.
But Marron and Mireles lived to tell the story of the woman they saved that January day.
And Wednesday, the partners from the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley Division and 11 other public safety personnel were awarded Medals of Valor for heroism on the job, presented by the Los Angeles Police Foundation. All had stories of risky situations when split-second decisions meant the difference between life and death.
“These people really are heroes. These people have done what most of us are unable to do,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at the ceremony. “With crises and fire, they go in when most of us are going out.”
One officer, however, never made it out.
Officer Richard Lizarraga was shot in the back and the side by an enraged man while responding to a domestic-violence call. Detective Richard Record dragged Lizarraga to safety, but the officer died later at a local hospital.
After receiving a Medal of Valor, Record removed it from around his neck and gave it to Lizarraga’s widow.
Other officers who received the high honor at the 45th annual event had tales of saving a 92-year-old woman from a fire, evacuating an apartment building filled with more than 50 people in an early morning blaze and taking down armed hostage-takers.
“You either got it in you or you don’t,” Mireles said of the on-the-spot decisions he and others have made. “It’s in your DNA.”
Mireles - who won a similar medal in 2001 for saving a car-crash victim - recalled that day nine months ago when he helped save the woman intent on killing herself.
She was lying on the building’s balcony and wanted to plunge off head-first. Mireles grabbed her leg, but the weight of her 200-pound body pulled them both to the edge.
Marron grabbed his partner, and the struggle continued as the woman twisted and turned her way off the balcony with the two men. At one point, both Mireles and the woman were dangling from their waists over the balcony’s edge.
Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Richard Markota remembered hearing the call that day on the scanner. He was trying to get an air-rescue cushion to cover the street below the balcony. But as he listened to the battle with the woman, he knew time was slipping away.
But then Firefighter Paul Schori stepped in. He was first at the scene that day with fellow Firefighter Fernando Vasquez, who stood outside and was talking to the woman.
With all his might, Schori yanked Mireles by the belt, which pulled both Marron and the suicidal woman away from the balcony’s edge.
“I was pulling as hard as I could,” said Schori, who along with Vasquez received plaques Wednesday. “It seemed like a long time, but was probably only a second.”
Marron, who as a rookie was learning the ropes from the veteran Mireles, said the duo just did what came naturally.
“When the time came … we both reacted without a game plan,” Marron said. “It was just instinct.”
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