SECURITY TECHNICIAN GUY BURNETT, 27
He rescues two trapped babies from a roadside canal

Last June 13 was a brilliant Sunday in South Florida, and Claudia Cox, in the backseat of a friend's Mitsubishi, was going from Miami to Naples to visit her boyfriend Otasha Barrett with their year-old twin daughters, Kendia and Kenisha, strapped into car seats beside her. Heading west through the Everglades on 1-75, Cox, 23, a hospital lab assistant, was singing gospel tunes with her cousin Simone Hyatt, who was sitting in front with driver Tashana Brown. But just after 3 p.m. a front tire blew, and the car crashed through a fence, flipping over and landing upside down in an alligator-infested canal. "All I could think was 'I'm going to die,' " says Cox. "Then I thought, 'Please, God, don't let anything happen to my babies.' "

The answer to her prayers was Guy Burnett, who had been just minutes behind Cox, driving with his wife and two children. Burnett pulled over and saw that all three women were out of the car, but that Cox was standing in the water screaming, "My babies!" Then a serviceman for a security firm, Burnett dove into the murky canal and tried vainly to open the car doors. "It was like pea soup," he recalls. "I wouldn't have seen my hand if I'd held it in front of my face." Finally, finding an open window, he unlocked a door and freed Kenisha from her car seat and brought her to safety. That's when he heard Cox screaming, "There's two of them!" Diving back in, he found Kendia and brought her to the surface. But it seemed too late. "She was like a rag doll," Burnett says. Cox's friend Brown, a flight attendant with first aid training, began administering CPR. Then Burnett, who learned the technique as a lifeguard in high school, took over. "C'mon, baby, breathe!" he exhorted. After a couple of minutes, Kendia whimpered. "That progressed to a good cry," he says. "It was like music to my ears."