Two BRPD officers honored Thursday after saving more than a dozen people in apartment fire
BATON ROUGE- Two officers were honored after they saved more than a dozen lives in an apartment fire in Scotlandville the morning of Sept. 1, 2020.
“We had gotten a call that there was a disturbance, and we needed to go back to the apartment complex to contact the other party involved. That is when we rolled up on the fire that was in a separate apartment,” Lt. Larry Walters said.
Body camera footage shows the two officers banging on doors, going in and out of apartments while the seconds tick by and the fire and concern grows.
You see smoke pouring out of a second-floor apartment.
The officers, later identified as Lt. Larry Walters and Cpl. Matthew Hurley, can be heard coughing as they run through the smoke — but that didn’t stop them. Both were hospitalized for smoke inhalation.
On Thursday, Walters and Hurley received the Baton Rouge Police Department’s Life Saving Award for their quick thinking and selfless actions.
Walters says they were just doing their jobs.
“I don’t feel like I should have an award for this because it would’ve been anything anyone else would have done,” Walters said.
The fire department ultimately blamed the fire on a child who set a mattress on fire while playing with a lighter.