FIREFIGHTER TIM DENEEN, 41
Digging deep for Jessy

Just that morning, last May 13, Tim Deneen's squad in the Wichita (Kans.) Fire Dept. had taken a special class on making rescues in confined spaces. Then at 7 p.m. the call came in: 17-month-old Jessy Kraus had tumbled into a well being dug in the backyard of his family's new home in nearby Mulvane. By the time Deneen and his technical rescue team arrived at 7:30, nearly two dozen rescue workers and neighbors were on the scene, and a local chemical company had set up a video camera to lower into the well—but that was not enough. "I saw that picture of his hand and this little head," Deneen, the father of two young girls and a firefighter since 1991, says of the video image. "I knew we had to get him."

Rescuers used a backhoe to dig a 20-ft.-deep pit next to the nearly 17-ft. well, then dug 7 ft. across to Jessy, who, by then exhausted, had fallen asleep. Deneen wedged himself into the 2-ft.-wide opening and grabbed the boy by the foot. "I asked him if he liked Barney," says Deneen. "And he said, 'No! No!' " Fifteen minutes later—five hours after the ordeal began—Deneen wrested the toddler from the pit, much to the relief of the boy's parents, Jerry Kraus, 30, and Karen, 28, who have another son, Cody, 8. (Karen was in the kitchen making dinner, and Jerry was with Jessy watering trees in the backyard when the toddler, walking toward him, tumbled into the well.) After a night in the hospital for observation, the little boy was released in the morning with just a minor bruise on his forehead and scratches on his elbow. "Thankfully it was one of those nights when everything worked like clockwork," says Deneen. "I could feel God all around."