PITTSBURGH — Our planet is a perilous place filled with terrifying ways to die. They need not be enumerated here; there is no practical benefit to extending your personal list of dreads. In the event you are knocked unconscious in a freak midair collision with another sky diver, for instance, you — hurtling insensate toward the ground — will be no better equipped to deploy your parachute for having once imagined this scenario.
In pie charts published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States government colors the deaths that occur within its borders in somber pastels. The infamous scourges of heart disease (dusty cobalt) and cancer (dull cornflower) were responsible for 44.3 percent of American deaths in 2017, according to one recent report. But a person expiring between the ages of one and 44 years is more likely to fall under what the charts render a yawning wedge of bilious turquoise: the color of dying by accident.
What cannot be gleaned from such charts are accidents that are thwarted — or the names of the people who attempted to thwart them. Acknowledging them is the self-appointed task of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission: a private foundation that identifies and rewards members of the public for being heroes.
Year-round, a small team of office workers endeavors to analyze the seconds when somebody intervenes to try to prevent death or serious injury. From a tidy headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh, they laboriously collect and scrutinize newspaper stories, hospital records, fire marshal reports, witness statements, family interviews, location sketches, tide charts, photographs of charred clothing, stairway dimensions, expert testimony on seasonal bear activity — anything they can get their hands on to better understand those calamitous situations in which outsiders intervened.
The Hero Fund’s task is not to assign blame, nor to explain why something happened. It is to identify those mere mortals who attempted individually, and bodily, to disrupt the relentless course of fate. And to send them a check for $5,500 and a hand-struck medal on behalf of humankind.
The paychecks for those who do this work arrive courtesy of a man who died 100 years ago. It is a testament to the magical ability of money to become more money that Andrew Carnegie’s gift of $5 million in 1904 has enabled the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission to distribute $41.3 million — and 10,135 medals — to individual heroes over the last 115 years.
Hero Prerequisites
The official requirements to become a Carnegie hero are brief and broad, but only people who act heroically within the United States and Canada are eligible. (A few European variants of the fund, likewise started by Andrew Carnegie, operate independently.) At a minimum, a “hero” must leave a place of safety and risk death to attempt to save the life of someone whom they have no responsibility to help. The attempt may fail and still be recognized, as long as it was done with courage. Acts must be brought to the fund’s attention within two years of their occurrence.
The award is open to civilians only; soldiers cannot win, nor can rescue professionals unless they have acted far outside the scope of their usual duties. (For instance: An off-duty firefighter recovering from shoulder surgery in British Columbia in 1997, recognized for her efforts to drive off a bear as it mauled a man to death, was Hero #8281).
Individuals previously convicted of crimes are eligible. (“Heroes deserve pardon and a fresh start,” the official 1904 deed of trust declares.) Hero #5969 received his award for a split-second decision to launch his body at an active shooter in Michigan in 1970. At the time, both shooter and hero were being transferred between prison facilities in the back of a police sedan; the hero was still shackled. Many, many heroes have been awarded for tackling armed gunmen. They include a street cleaning commissioner, a human resources director, an exotic dancer, several teachers, a data analyst, a barber, a telemarketer, a newspaper editor, a bricklayer, an investment adviser, and a county jail elevator operator whose parents were born enslaved.
To separate the wheat of true heroism from the chaff of acts that are merely extremely admirable, the fund requires “conclusive evidence to support the act’s occurrence.” The gathering of such evidence falls to a team of four investigators.
“Hero Hunters”
On a Thursday morning in November, opposite a low sink where staff members rinse out their coffee mugs, Jewels Phraner, a former Carnegie case investigator (or “hero hunter,” as Harper’s Magazine put it in 1912), plucked a file at random from the cabinets that house the oldest case records: Hero #410.
The manila folder was filled with historical papers as fragile as tuile cookies: 1908 newspaper clippings, an architectural diagram of a mine crosscut from multiple perspectives and a page translucent with age covered in Italian cursive that came with a translated document that revealed this to be a widow’s description of her husband. He had suffocated underground in a mine in Montana, thousands of miles from the village where she lived in Italy, while attempting to save a fellow miner.
“Nothing strange has ever happened to him,” the widow attested.
There was also, as in every one of the folders, the official “Report of Special Agent,” this one typewritten by a Carnegie investigator, lightly marked with edits — each instance of “Joseph” corrected to “Giovanni.” (For the first several decades of its existence, the Hero Fund required research to be conducted at the site of the event by a team of itinerant investigators. Until 1989, they were always male and tended to be single.)
From the report, it is possible to learn the exact underground dimensions and layout of the West Colusa mine in which Giovanni Pinazza died; that the weather at about 9:30 a.m. on May 20, 1908, was “clear” and “warm”; that the gas that eventually killed both victim and hero was invisible, but gave a taste to the air; that the man Mr. Pinazza died trying to save had gone looking for an oil can and then had lost consciousness; that one of Mr. Pinazza’s co-workers had a reputation for lying; that, for this reason, another miner advised the investigator that “the widow of the rescuer should be dealt with direct,” and that, if any money were to be awarded posthumously to Mr. Pinazza, “it should not pass through the hands of” the lying man; that Mr. Pinazza’s wages were $4.00 a day.
The fund sent a medal and a check for $1,000 to Mrs. Pinazza in Italy. (Until 1979, when the decision was made to award every hero a standard sum, money was dispensed subjectively.) Other documents in the folder reveal what followed. She and her children subsequently emigrated to Montana, where they lived with a family member described in a later Carnegie report as a violent “habitual drunkard” with a tendency to “carry on like one insane.” In 1931, the fund awarded Mrs. Pinazza an additional monthly grant of $45, which continued until her death in 1960. (Ongoing stipends, usually a few hundred dollars a month, are still sometimes distributed to the dependents of heroes who died or were seriously injured while performing their acts, or to the surviving heroes themselves. A map in the office is dotted with pushpins marking recipients’ locations.)
About one in five heroes is honored posthumously.
“I don’t think it’s gotten any easier,” said Susan Rizza, an investigator.
Ms. Rizza became the organization’s first female investigator in 1989. Her office has a sunflower motif. While researching the rail mechanics of a large American city’s public transit system for a case not yet presented to the board, whose volunteer members read and vote on each case, she took a break to consider whether 30 years of punctiliously seeking out the stomach-turning details of killings and accidents had changed the way she processes such information.
“Death cases, where you have to interview somebody like a spouse,” are the hardest, she said. “It’s even worse when they were eyewitnesses to what happened, and I have to work myself up to — because you never know how they’re going to react.”
Ms. Rizza once conducted a phone interview with a boy whose mother was killed in front of him by an animal he tried to fight off. She recalled that he was composed. Other people, understandably, have a harder time. Many end up apologizing to her — “‘I’m really sorry’” — for their lack of composure when recalling specific details of the most traumatic moments of their lives.
“Sometimes, I get off the phone and you almost just want to cry,” she said.
Heroes Assessed
Most Carnegie investigators were previously employed as newspaper reporters in and around Pittsburgh. Joe Mandak, who joined the team two years ago, spent the 17 years prior covering southeastern Pennsylvania for The Associated Press. In an office next to Ms. Rizza’s, he ran through the details of a burning vehicle case currently on his roster with the gruff efficiency of a veteran reporter, until, midsentence, when his own emotions appeared to catch up, taking him by surprise. He stopped speaking. He made a ball with his fist and pounded his wooden desk twice. He began again, in a shaking voice, to describe the scene that unfolded as flames consumed the back seat of a car.
Over the course of investigators’ careers, particular knacks emerge. Mr. Mandak, who has a casual air and a rich bass speaking voice, discovered a latent talent for drawing out reluctant witnesses in certain cases.
“I got a lot of dead kids, because I’m really good at talking to grieving parents, apparently,” said Ms. Phraner, who grew up in California and has a tranquil, businesslike manner.
The fund’s aim is to award every awardable act — there is no limit to the number of awards that can be given. Office policy is to err on the side of investigating a case if it seems at all viable; typically, only about 80 cases out of the roughly 1,000 annual nominations are deemed eligible. The investigations team learns of most cases through news clipping services or from Google Alerts for phrases like “died saving” and “rescued.” “Hero” is one of the least productive search terms, because it generates so many useless results.
“If a video game comes out with the word ‘hero,’” said the investigations manager Jeffrey Dooley, who curates all nominations, “I literally go insane.”
Many Carnegie heroes, he said, express skepticism of the fund’s purpose when first contacted.
“‘Are you an insurance company?’ ‘Do you want money from us?’”
No, Mr. Dooley insisted. “We give away our money.” (Past heroes are also a regular source of tips.)
Hero vs. Death
“There was a school shooting today in California,” said Ms. Phraner shortly after lunch. “And so, we’re aware, we make a note and we wait until things sort of settle.” The case was entered into the investigators’ electronic database immediately — well within the two-year window for consideration — so that it can remain eligible even through the unfolding of a lengthy court case. In October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting happened five miles from the Carnegie office; the staff will not begin investigating acts of possible heroism inside the synagogue until the trial concludes.
Ms. Phraner recalled the shock her neighbors felt on the day of the attack. “People will be like ‘That happened right here. I didn’t think things like that happened,’” she said. “I knew things like that happened. Anywhere.”
Emotions come in waves when one reads the Carnegie investigators’ spare, concise descriptions of heroic acts en masse, as it is possible to do on the organization website. There is one class of ordeal to which, although it would be petrifying to live through, the reader becomes swiftly numb. The first 10 write-ups about heroes saving people from burning cars are astonishing; it’s difficult for the remaining 1,257 to carry the same jolt.
On the other hand, being forced to acknowledge the astonishing number of settings in which a woman might be stabbed by a man she has never met — while placing an order in a bakery, or waiting tables in a restaurant, or crossing the street, or sitting in a wheelchair outside her apartment, or driving a bus, or jogging through a city park, or standing in her kitchen — produces skin prickling, nausea and paranoia as the numbers creep up.
Human and animal attack cases typically get the most attention when Carnegie awards are announced every quarter, said Eric Zahren, the fund’s president. “It just affects the psyche a little bit differently than natural perils like drowning, burning.”
He said the fund, which currently offers to help defray the cost of treatment for heroes diagnosed with PTSD, has recently begun to more closely examine the psychological aftereffects of the heroic acts it honors, in the hopes of offering further support. It seems common among Carnegie heroes, board members have noticed, to experience unusually vivid dreams about the rescues for some time after the events.
Before he became president, Mr. Zahren spent 25 years in the Secret Service, retiring as the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office. “In my last career, I dealt a lot with the darker side of human nature,” he said.
Even the bleakest Carnegie stories, by contrast, strobe with flashes of good will. Inherent in every heroic attempt is hope. Many heroes escape not just with their own lives, but having rescued someone else. Of course, a life is worth more than $5,500. Of course, no one is more deserving of $5,500 than a hero.
In 2009, Mr. Zahren’s brother-in-law, a Pittsburgh policeman, was killed alongside two other officers while responding to a domestic dispute. For Mr. Zahren, this unconventional job offers the chance to comfort others in the way he recalls being comforted at that time — “knowing how it feels to lose somebody that you’re close to” and “how it feels when other people honor that individual.” But he acknowledged that it can take a psychological toll.
“If you’re not careful, you can look at everybody and everything as a threat. And then you add on to that the dangers of daily life that maybe you didn’t think that much about till you started reading these cases,” he said. “You can turn into a complete basket case.”
Life is random. Some lives will end from electrocution by a loose telephone wire, but most will not. Even those people saved from such a death — like the boy whom Hero #315 died rescuing Houston in 1909 — will die eventually. (For the boy, it was a gunshot wound in 1928.) Heroic efforts are ultimately irrelevant in the face of such inevitability. But to the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, inevitability is irrelevant. Good intentions carry their own weight.