Burn Institute to Honor 12 Who Made Fire Rescues

On a November afternoon, 2-year-old Ivan Bedolla went into his bedroom, locked the door and began playing with a cigarette lighter.

Moments later, Ivan’s mother, Amellia, saw smoke coming from beneath the door. Finding it locked, she dashed outside her San Ysidro home to get her older son, George, who was playing football with a friend in the front yard.

“She just started screaming,” he said.

George, 13, remembers running after his mother, who grabbed a stick and smashed Ivan’s bedroom window. George crawled through the window and found his brother lying on the floor with his clothes on fire. George doesn’t know how he did it, but he managed to unlock the door and carry Ivan to the front yard, where he rolled him in the grass to put out the flames. Ivan suffered minor burns to his face and hands.

George became a hero.

Next Thursday at 8 p.m. in the San Diego Hilton, the Burn Institute’s 13th annual Spirit of Courage award banquet will honor George Bedolla and 11 other county residents who risked their lives last year so that someone else wouldn’t lose theirs in a fire. Each recipient will receive a plaque.

The institute keeps newspaper clippings of fire rescues each year and asks city and county agencies and some companies to submit nominations for the award, said institute spokeswoman Elizabeth San Vicente. She said the institute checks with authorities to verify the facts in their clippings, then encourages the authorities to nominate the person who made the rescue. George was nominated by the San Diego Fire Department.

Nominations must be submitted by Dec. 31 of each year, Vicente said.

Other recipients of the award are: Milt Gordon, a Veteran’s Administration police officer; California Highway Patrol Officer Vernon Machado; San Diego firefighters Denis McNeill, Walter Faust and Oscar Flagg; McDonald’s restaurant manager Robert Olivieri of Imperial Beach; San Diego Police Officers Kenneth Verdine and Craig Speck, and San Diego residents Louis Parker Jr., Icie Hale and Darryl Curran.