Fairuz Schlecht was asleep inside her Newport Beach apartment on Lido Isle when she began hearing her two children, yelling:
“Get out! … Get out! … There’s a fire!”
Schlecht, then 51, was the last to make her way downstairs. The sound of flames and the smell of black smoke spread throughout her home.
Her neighbors, Francesca and Aviran Bar-Lev, had stepped outside their apartment on Via Lido Nord to show friends a house they were building five doors away. Their two children and a friend were upstairs watching a movie. It was the couple’s apartment where the electrical fire broke out on the first floor, city officials would determine, with a nearby Christmas tree adding fuel.
Schlecht look outside her window facing the bay — an orangey sky.
Jensen, her 11-year-old, looked out a window, too, and saw his neighbors and yelled again: “Mom, mom, the kids are hanging out the window — they’re screaming, they’re trapped!”
What Schlecht did next that Dec. 20, 2022, night, at about 10, earned her a bronze medal from the Carnegie Hero Fund, a prestigious honor for civilian heroism. In 2023, 65 were handed out across the United States and Canada. In the latest round of 18 honorees, four died helping.
“All the men and women recognized today, in acts of extraordinary heroism, risked serious injury or death to save others,” the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission said in a December statement.
Schlecht ordered her son to evacuate their home, and despite his pleas for her to join him, she began running back up the stairs. Her 9-year-old daughter, Cosette, got out safely as well.
“I don’t think I ran up the stairs, I felt like I was being carried,” Schlecht recalled. “I could feel this force behind me lifting me up.”
On the second floor, the apartments were accessible to each other via a service door. She only had on a bra and underwear — no time to add clothes.
She entered the Bar-Lev apartment’s second-floor.
Schlecht, who did not know Francesca and Aviran had stepped out, thought the couple had succumbed to the fire that had reached their bedroom.
“I stepped into a mass inferno on the left,” she said. “Their bedroom — the roof was gone. The flames looked like they were twice the size of the house, and I felt the heat on my face. It was bright, bright yellow. My eyes were hot, my skin was hot, and the roof was gone.”
Blinded by the heavy smoke, Schlecht ran as fast as she could along the hallway and kicked down the children’s bedroom door, which the children had locked in an attempt to keep the smoke and fire out.
The door fell, knocking Schlecht down — briefly.
The sound of explosions from the fire echoed in the background. Strong, high-pitched winds swooped in — she felt like she was in an airplane engine.
She made her way around the pitch-black bedroom, yelling.
“Enzo! … Farrah!”
The boy was 5, his sister 6.
“As loud as I was screaming, and I was screaming like a monster, the fire was 100 times louder than me,” Schlecht said.
She found Farrah and 9-year-old family friend Ruby and held them close, kissing their foreheads.
“I got you. I love you.”
She then scooped up Enzo, who had been hiding under the bed, and tucked him under an arm. She held Farrah against her hip, as she and Ruby bolted back into the hallway toward the service door.
Just as they made it to the door — Farrah jumped out of her arms and ran into her parents’ burning bedroom, thinking they were still asleep.
Schlecht said everything shifted and fear began kicking in.
“Farrah!”
“All I could see was the back of her feet until the yellow just took over her and she was gone,” Schlecht said.
The fire continued to spread to the surrounding walls.
Schlecht ran after Farrah.
She started losing her voice and began having trouble breathing after inhaling smoke. Upon entering the room, Farrah jumped onto Schlecht, and Schlecht began walking back toward safety — when the room started to spin and her memory went blank.
Newport Beach Fire Department Capt. Joe Harrison was on the first engine to arrive. A copious amount of dense, black smoke was pouring out from the roof.
Francesca and Aviran Bar-Lev told him there were three children inside.
“I remember thinking, if anyone was in there, they’d be dead,” Capt. Harrison said.
Schlecht and the three children had made it out, actually, before that first engine arrived, the captain would learn.
The Bar-Lev children were treated for smoke inhalation, and Ruby was treated for minor burns on her feet the next day. Schlecht, the director of customization and design at Gunther Werks Porsche, where she creates customized interior and exterior designs for luxury cars, lost partial hearing in her right ear and developed severe tinnitus.
“We were gone for about eight minutes when we noticed through the window that the house was completely engulfed in flames,” Francesca Bar-Lev said. “I remember running and feeling too slow, like I couldn’t be there fast enough. I was screaming their names and I just saw all the flames coming through their bedroom window.”
Thirty firefighters from the Newport Beach, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa fire departments responded; the fire was extinguished several hours later.
“Had she not done what she did, the children would not have been alive,” the fire captain said. “She is the very definition of a hero.”
Harrison successfully nominated Schlecht for the Carnegie Hero Fund award. She received the medal and $7,500 and lives elsewhere in Newport Beach now; her apartment also suffered extensive fire damage.
“When I think about how brave she was to save (us), it makes me want to be like her,” Farrah said. “She’s my shero.”
(Yes, shero — as in Schlecht isn’t a he-ro, but a she-ro.)
