After his mother called and woke him up at 2:30 a.m. Oct. 9 to make sure he was OK in the heavy winds, Mario Monte saw a glow coming from one of the bedrooms in the Coffey Park assisted living facility where he was the live-in caretaker for five elderly women.
“I was about to go back to my room, when I saw a light coming from the corridor,” said Monte, 23, a first-semester nursing student at College of Marin. “I went in the room, and the woman was sleeping.
“I opened the blinds, and there’s a fire right there, burning up the house next door,” he said. “The fire was right in front of my face.”
What to do?
“I panicked, but then the word ‘safety’ came into my mind, and I just focused on that,” Monte recalled.
He telephoned 911 and he flipped on the front porch light. As he struggled to get the women out of bed and out the door, Santa Rosa police arrived, and they all took three of the five elderly charges out to two patrol cars.
The other two women, in wheelchairs, Monte and the police lifted into his own car.
With seconds to spare before embers began consuming the facility, Monte grabbed two items as he ran out the door: his lab coat and stethoscope.
“It’s all I have left,” Monte said Thursday during a break between classes at the College of Marin’s Kentfield campus.
Those items are perhaps symbolic of events that night that affirmed, for the rest of his life, his dedication as a future medical professional.
“I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life knowing that people in my care had died,” Monte said. “You would not be an effective nurse if you were not up to the task of preserving life.”
Monte was honored Tuesday as a hero in a resolution presented by the College of Marin Board of Trustees. He said the college staff and his fellow students have been supportive and kind, giving him clothes to wear and other necessities.
“Sometimes now when I think about it, I cannot believe I managed to get those ladies out,” said Monte, who came to the Bay Area with his mother, step-father and sister five years ago from the Philippines. “We all still feel post-traumatic stress, like something’s going to happen, an accident or a fire.”
He said he does not think of himself as a hero.
“I just did what everyone should be doing when confronted with a situation like that,” he said.
He and his family, now living in Novato at a friend’s house, have no idea what comes next. They lost all their possessions as well as their rented family home nearby in Santa Rosa and the senior facility that was Monte’s and his family’s main source of income.
Monte said he missed two weeks of clinical time at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael because the hospital was inundated with patients evacuated from Kaiser Santa Rosa during the fires. He was able to make up the time at the college’s “simulation lab,” which uses mannequins of patients and a “classroom” of hospital beds.
“The real superstars are the police and first responders,” he said, noting that he couldn’t have moved the five women without the help of Santa Rosa police. “In a tragedy like this, all we have is each other.”
No one knows that more than Ed Lopez, the son of Irene Lopez, 86, whose abandoned red wheelchair that Monte had used to transport her into his car was captured in stark relief in the ashes days later by photographer Karl Mondon of Bay Area News Group. It drew the attention of Bay Area media outlets.
“I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving,” said Lopez, a Georgia podiatrist, in a phone interview Friday. “If she (his mother) had died in that fire, I can only wonder how awful that would have been.”
Lopez, who is flying back and forth across the country every week to check on his mom at her new senior home in Santa Rosa, said he offered to pay for Monte’s school textbooks, but the nursing student declined.
“He said the dean (at the College of Marin) took him down to the school bookstore and said, ‘You can have any books you want,’” Lopez said. He remains grateful to Monte.
“He’s very humble,” Lopez said of Monte. “He said he did what he was supposed to do.”
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©2017 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.)
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