Young Calgarian who died rescuing girl from lake honoured with top heroism award

A young Calgary man who died saving a child from drowning in a B.C. lake is one of 17 people who were on Monday awarded the highest honour for civilian heroism in the U.S. and Canada, the Carnegie Medal.

The Carnegie Medal is given to those who risk their lives while saving or trying to save the lives of others. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission was established 116 years ago by U.S. industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, inspired by two people who lost their lives trying to rescue others in the Harwick mine disaster near Pittsburgh that claimed 181 lives.

Among the latest to be awarded the medal is Jon Stein-Palmiere, a 20-year-old Calgary man who died in May 2019.

Stein-Palmiere was on vacation with his girlfriend's family at Lake Windermere in southeastern B.C. when he heard his girlfriend's 10-year-old stepsister calling for help and swam out to her rescue.

"He saw her … struggling to keep her head above the water," his friend Dakota Hopkins told CBC News at the time. "He threw her up into the air, and when he threw her up in the air, he went under. He just couldn't recover from it."

Stein-Palmiere saved the girl but didn't make it back to shore himself.

Hopkins said Stein-Palmiere was taken by ambulance to hospital, where he died.

He said he wasn't surprised at all that Stein-Palmiere went out a hero. 

"That is exactly the kind of person Jon was," he said. "What kind of person he was, was that when push comes to shove you gotta step up, and that's what Jon did and he stepped up and he did something amazing … he made it, he saved her.

"That's what a beautiful soul like him would do."

Loved music

Stein-Palmiere was studying carpentry at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and dreamed of opening his own woodworking shop one day.

Hopkins said his friend was a music lover who taught himself to play guitar and brightened the lives of everyone who knew him.

There was one other Canadian named among the 17 medal recipients on Monday, Harmanjeet Singh Gill of Brampton, Ont.

Gill, a truck driver who was then 20, was driving in Brampton on Aug. 29, 2018, when he saw a violent crash. He raced up to a burning SUV, stuck his head and arms through the vehicle's sunroof and pulled out one of the three men inside, pulling him to safety.

Then he went back and dragged a second man to safety. Returning to the vehicle again, he had difficulty reaching the third man. With the help of a teen, he broke the sunroof and they were able to pull the third man to safety before the entire vehicle was engulfed in flames.

This was the final announcement of 2020 recipients of Carnegie Medals. Each of the award recipients or their survivors will receive a financial grant.

Since the fund was established, it has given out more than $42 million in one-time grants, scholarship aid, death benefits and assistance.