Cat left in plane’s cargo hold

On June 18 of 2011, Joe Lindsey was by the Guntersville airport with his family when he saw a plane crash. He drove part of the way to the crash, and rushed through the woods to pull a seven year old boy from the burning wreckage. Lindsey was awarded the Medal of Honor on Thursday April 12, with top state officials like Governor Robert Bentley in attendance.

The Medal of Honor is the Alabama Legislature’s highest honor given to law enforcement. Joe Lindsey is with the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources—a state game warden—and this is not his first rescue; in 2008, Lindsey rescued a child from a burning van. He does not consider himself a hero, just that he is “a guy who was in the right place at the right time and I had a job to do.”