Some acts of courage happen in seconds, leaving little time to consider the danger or the consequences.
For Robert Z. Fortner of Waverly, Tennessee, that moment came May 2, 2022, when he learned that two young boys were trapped inside a burning home in Clarksville.
Fortner, then 29 and a K-9 handler for the sheriff’s department, was patrolling nearby when he heard the report of children possibly trapped in the house. He responded to find smoke rising from the home.
He first tried the front.
Fortner kicked in the front door, but flames and heavy smoke made entry impossible. He moved to the backyard, where the boys’ mother directed him to a bedroom window.
The brothers, ages 7 and 8, were still inside.
Fortner found a ladder, climbed to the window, smashed the glass and cleared the broken pieces from the frame. Then he went through the window headfirst.
What awaited him was more complicated than simply reaching through a window for the children. Fortner landed inside a partially enclosed play structure beneath a lofted bed. With dense smoke eliminating visibility and intense heat filling the bedroom, he crawled through the structure until he reached the 7-year-old boy, who was crying.
Fortner tucked the child under his arm and crawled back toward the window, where he passed him to another sheriff’s deputy.
Then Fortner turned around and went back in.
He crawled through the structure again and found the 8-year-old. The boy lost consciousness during the rescue, and Fortner dragged him by the arm through the play structure and back to the window, where he handed him to the deputy outside.
Both brothers were hospitalized for smoke inhalation and recovered.
Fortner did not emerge unharmed. He suffered smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning and remained hospitalized until the following day. He also recovered.
Later that year, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission selected Fortner to receive the Carnegie Medal, which recognizes civilians who voluntarily risk death or serious physical injury to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save another person. The medal has been awarded for civilian heroism in the United States and Canada since the Hero Fund was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1904.
Fortner was included among 16 recipients announced in December 2022.
His story carries another Tennessee connection. Fortner is from Waverly, a community whose name became associated with tragedy after the catastrophic August 2021 flood. Yet his Carnegie Medal was earned months later and miles away, in a Clarksville bedroom filled with smoke, where two children needed someone willing to go toward the danger rather than away from it.
Fortner went in once for one child.
Then he went back for the other.
That is going above and beyond.
Source note: Information for this article was verified through the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission’s official record of Robert Z. Fortner and its December 2022 announcement of Carnegie Medal recipients.
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