Brian Melendrez is afraid of heights. But he couldn’t bear the idea of watching someone die in front of him.
So when a person ran in front of the café at the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier where he works and shouted that there was a child in the water on the afternoon of Feb. 5, Melendrez, 25, dove in, following the lead of another man who jumped in a few seconds earlier.
“I could see he couldn’t swim,” he said from behind the counter of the Manhattan Beach Yacht Club on a recent afternoon. “The water was here,” he said, holding his hand to his upper chest.
“I knew if we waited another minute, he was not going to make it. Sure enough, as soon as we got in, he gave up.”
Melendrez, who lives in Hawthorne and works nights at Costco, realized that the child was in fact a young man he’d seen “moping around” on the pier earlier.
Melendrez’s boss, Ted Brown, threw a life ring that had been hanging off the pier down to the two men below. Then he tied a hose onto the railing and tossed it down for them to grab.
“We didn’t go in with the intent of saving him, we just wanted to buy him some time,” said Melendrez.
Soon two firefighters arrived on the scene.
“The fire department got a call that someone was in the water,” said Fire Captain David Shenbaum, who also works part-time as an LA County lifeguard.
“We normally never beat the lifeguards during the day,” Shenbaum said.  “But it was somewhat foggy, and the lifeguard was on patrol on the beach north of the pier.”
Shenbaum drove onto the pier, which he said was “mobbed with numerous people screaming.”
The fire captain, who has rescued people off the pier twice before, recently helped start a program at the Manhattan Beach Fire Department to teach a small group of firefighters how to make water rescues on such occasions, which usually happen during the winter and evening, when the lifeguards move to their headquarters in Hermosa Beach.
Firefighter David Schwarting, whom Shenbaum said had just successfully passed the swim test, also jumped in.
While Schwarting and Shenbaum helped the men in the water, lifeguards arrived. They used a paddleboard to get the young man ashore. Paramedics treated him on the beach and then took him to the hospital.
It wasn’t clear if he jumped or fell in.
“No one witnessed it,” said A.J. Lester, a spokesperson for the lifeguard division of the LA County Fire Department.
“No one knew until there was a big splash and they heard him yell for help.”
Although the lifeguards cautioned that it’s generally better to leave the water rescues to the professionals, they praised the efforts of Melendrez and the other man who jumped in, whose first name was Ken but whose last name wasn’t immediately known.
Lester said that the lifeguards wanted to nominate the men for Citizens Medal of Valor awards.
“It was a very selfless and heroic thing to do,” said Lester.
Back at the pier, Melendrez’s boss says he thought the two men’s efforts were necessary.
“That guy was essentially dead, so these guys needed to jump in,” Brown said.
Leaning over the railing a few weeks later, Melendrez noticed the long distance to the water’s surface. He seemed a little surprised that he jumped in so quickly. It was a “split-second decision,” he said.
“If that was someone’s loved one or family,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to face them if I stood there and waited for help.” ER
