In June 1998, a deadly fire tore through an apartment building on Washington Street in Hartford, Connecticut. It killed a young girl’s cousin — and nearly took her life too.
Five-year-old Josibelk “Josi” Aponte was pulled from the flames by firefighters who crawled through thick black smoke with almost zero visibility. When they brought her out, she had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. Hartford Police Officer Peter Getz — a patrolman at the time — took her from the firefighters’ arms and immediately began CPR.
With no ambulance available, another officer drove the patrol car at full speed toward the hospital while Getz worked on Josi in the back seat — fighting every second to bring her back. By the time they reached the emergency room, she was beginning to respond. The medical team did the rest.
Josi survived. But she carried the loss of her cousin with her as she grew up — and she chose to carry it forward, not let it hold her back.
Getz never forgot the little girl he carried out of that fire. He later rose to the rank of detective before retiring — but for years, he quietly followed Josi’s progress through the school system, just to make sure she was doing well.
Josi, meanwhile, grew up with almost no memory of that night. She didn’t know what happened. She didn’t even know the name of the man who saved her.
That changed when she typed her own name into a Google search one day — and a black-and-white newspaper photograph stopped her cold. A little girl, covered in ash, being carried out of a burning building. It took her a moment to realize: that little girl was her.
“I didn’t know what happened at all,” she said.
She tracked down Peter Getz. They met, and he told her everything — the fire, the smoke, the race to the hospital, the moment she started breathing again. From that day forward, they stayed in touch.
In May 2016, Josi Aponte walked across the graduation stage at Eastern Connecticut State University. Peter Getz was there in the crowd — cheering louder than anyone.
She graduated magna cum laude — with high honors — with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. She already had a job waiting at an accounting firm, with plans to continue toward her master’s degree.
The Hartford Police Department later shared both the 1998 rescue photo and the 2016 graduation photo side by side on their official Facebook page — and the internet fell in love with the story all over again.
“Honestly, it gave me a chill to know that such a long time ago we almost lost her — and to where she is now,” Getz said.
“It’s very special to me,” said Aponte. “Without him, there is no me.”
