YUCAIPA >> Apart from the rain, Friday was a typical summer day for three teenage friends — until they heard cries for help.
After taking a swim, Justin French, Austin Chaffins and Cole Erautt, all 17, went for a walk to check out water rushing through a flood-control channel and crossing over the 33000 block of Avenue D near Chaffins’ home.
In the channel on the south side of the road, a middle-age homeless couple were struggling to escape the quick-moving and rapidly rising water.
“There’s hobos in there. We got to go save them,” Chaffins recalled saying at the time, as he retraced their actions a day later while standing on the bank of the now mostly dry channel. “So we ran in here,” he said Saturday.
The boys jumped into the waist-high water from the street, navigating submerged rocks and brush to the middle of the channel where the couple had erected a tent.
At first, the woman worried about her belongings.
Her partner, Chaffins said, “was like, ‘we don’t have any stuff, honey. We’re homeless.’ ”
For the next five minutes or so the teens struggled to hoist the couple up the steep eastern bank, about 50 yards from the street. Tracks in the sand bank Saturday illuminated the struggle.
In the channel, a tarp, one white Nike shoe, a black K-Swiss sneaker, two vodka bottles and other miscellaneous items were all that remained of the couple’s encampment.
After the rescue, police and firefighters arrived and took the couple to Redlands Community Hospital.
“She’s going to be a little bruisy there,” French said. “We had to drag her out.”
Hours after the rescue, the Sheriff’s Department sent out a community message, hailing the boys as good Samaritans.
“It was exciting for us to hear that people are out there looking out for each other,” Cpl. Kevin Allen of the sheriff’s Yucaipa station said by phone.
Collectively, Erautt, Chaffins and French weren’t sure if they should be considered heroes.
“It’s just like, we were there at that moment,” Chaffins said. “It’s kind of trippy.”
“Seemed like fate,” French added.
“It was kind of like an instinct,” Erautt said by phone. “It was weird, we just went for it.”
Those instincts may pay off if the Yucaipa High School students continue down a path toward a career in public safety.
French and Chaffins said they’re thinking of becoming firefighters. Erautt is contemplating joining them or going into law enforcement after they graduate next year.
“That was kind of cool,” French said, reflecting on the rescue. “It was a good feeling.”
