Last Updated on May 28, 2026 by admin
The call came in to Riverside County Fire Station 31 at four-eleven in the afternoon. A residential structure fire in a small Jurupa Valley apartment complex. Smoke from a third-floor window. Two children pulled out by a neighbor before the engine got there. The mother, on the sidewalk, screaming about four cats.
Engineer Andres Reyes went in second.
The first crew had already done the primary search and confirmed the apartment was clear of people. The second sweep — the one that gets the pets — was Reyes and a probationary firefighter named Tess Holloway, on her fourth structure fire ever.
They found the four cats in the back bedroom. Three of them were under the bed. One — a small gray-and-white domestic shorthair the mother on the sidewalk was calling Smoky — was on the bedroom carpet halfway to the doorway, as if she had been on her way to where she could hear voices.
Smoky was not breathing.
Reyes had been a veterinary technician for two years in his early twenties, before he became a firefighter. He had not done feline CPR in eleven years. He remembered, from the inside of his hands, the rhythm. Two breaths to the nose. Compressions over the heart. Two breaths. Compressions. The cat goes in your lap. The cat is much smaller than a person. The pressure is much less.
He carried Smoky out first. He worked on her on the sidewalk in front of the building, kneeling on the asphalt in his bunker gear, with Holloway holding a small oxygen mask against the cat’s face between Reyes’s breaths.
Smoky came back at the eighty-second compression.
Holloway said later that the cat coughed first, a small wet cough that sounded like something a child would make, and then she opened her eyes — green, dilated, confused — and looked at Reyes the way cats look at strangers, and Reyes laughed once and started crying.
The other three cats came out next. One was already breathing on her own — a young black cat the mother was calling Pepper. Two were not — a tortoiseshell named Marigold and a long-haired buff tabby named Toast.
Marigold came back at the forty-second compression. Toast did not.
The veterinary team that had been called to the scene by the time Smoky was on the sidewalk took Toast and worked on him in the back of their mobile unit for nineteen more minutes, until the lead veterinarian, gently, said the thing veterinarians say in those moments, and they covered him with a clean white towel and they brought him out to the mother on the sidewalk.
The mother was holding Smoky, who was alive, against her chest. She was holding Pepper, who was alive, against the other side. Marigold, alive, was in the soft carrier the engine had brought.
Toast was the only one of the four. He had been eleven. He had been adopted from a Riverside shelter in 2017.
The family went to stay with the mother’s sister in San Bernardino that night. The three surviving cats went too. They are at the sister’s house now. Smoky, the one who was on her way to the door, sleeps on the sister’s shoulder.
Reyes does not, generally, give interviews. He gave a short one to the local news, on the morning after, with Tess Holloway beside him.
The reporter asked him whether he had done feline CPR before.
Reyes said: “A long time ago. I was a vet tech. I thought I’d forgotten how.”
The reporter asked: “When did you remember?”
Reyes said: “When I put her in my lap.”
The body remembers. The hands remember. Eleven years of fire-engine work did not get the rhythm out of him. The rhythm came back when there was a cat in his lap who needed it.
Toast did not come home. The three who did are at the sister’s house tonight. Smoky is on the sister’s shoulder.
That is most of the things that happened.