In its first award announcement of 2003, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission named 19 individuals from throughout the United States and Canada as recipients of the Carnegie Medal. The bronze medal is given to persons who risk their lives to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the lives of others. Two of the awardees died in the performance of their heroic acts. The announcement brings to 8,685 the number of persons honored since the Pittsburgh-based Fund’s inception in 1904. One of the 19 award winners honored on Thursday night was Larry Hicks, the man who saved the life of Jack Roush. The Commission gave the following description: “Larry J. Hicks saved Jack E. Roush from drowning, Troy, Alabama, April 19, 2002. Unconscious and badly injured, Roush, 60, remained restrained in a seat of the open-cockpit, light airplane he had been flying, after it crashed into a small lake. The plane, inverted and nose down in the eight-foot-deep lake, leaked aviation fuel into the water. Hicks, 52, conservation enforcement officer, was at his home nearby and witnessed the accident. He immediately responded to the lake, then took a boat to where parts of the plane were protruding from the water. Although somewhat weakened by effects of cancer treatment, Hicks dived into the water to search for occupants of the plane, finding Roush on the second dive and freeing him on the third. Surfacing, Hicks resuscitated Roush, who remained unconscious. Rescue personnel responding by boat towed Roush to the bank, Hicks helping to support him. Roush required hospitalization for treatment of numerous injuries, and he recovered. Hicks sustained first-degree chemical burns about his upper body, which required hospital treatment and from which he recovered, and related injury.”( MotorsportsTV )(2-28-2003)
