From the Orange County Register:
On the night of Dec. 4, Gutierrez, 17, was doing homework in his San Clemente home when he heard loud screams coming from the building next door. He rounded up his 15-year-old sister, Carla, and 16-year-old cousin, Jenni Hernandez, and grabbed a fire extinguisher from his apartment building.
The trio rushed outside and saw smoke pouring from the three-story apartment building next to theirs, Gutierrez said.
Orange County sheriff's deputies were already on scene breaking windows and assisting with evacuations at one end of the building, near where the fire started, Gutierrez said.
But at the other end of the building was a panic-stricken elderly couple waiting for help at their open front door.
Their second-story windows had become blackened by smoke, and the woman was in a wheelchair crying and screaming for someone to please help her, Gutierrez recalled.
[...]
Q. You're a cadet in the Orange County Sheriff's Explorer program, which teaches you about law enforcement and emergency first response. How did those experiences help you?
A. Firefighters take care of the fire, but if you're the first one on the scene, you make sure everyone is OK and make sure no one is inside the house. You break windows and open doors. That's what came to my mind when I was helping out. I don't think I was doing anything special.
Read it all right here.