He’s a hero retriever.
A Colorado police officer melted pooch lovers’ hearts after valiantly saving a dog from a burning car, as seen in this POV footage captured via his bodycam. The dramatic rescue occurred last month but is currently blowing up on Facebook as fans laud the cop for his bravery.
“My thought at that point was ‘he’s coming out with me regardless of whatever else might be happening,'” Michael Gregorek, a deputy with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, explained of the incident. The harrowing incident occurred Jan. 22 after the policeman was dispatched to the scene of a “vehicle fire,” Storyful reported.
The hero cop said, “Once I arrived on scene, first thing I see is a gentleman who ended up being the owner of the vehicle, and the owner of the dog, throwing something at the back of vehicle.”
Initially thinking it was someone tossing “Molotov cocktails,” Gregorek caught wise to the dire situation after the man screamed, “My dog’s in the car.”
“It flipped [the] switch from ‘It’s obviously not a crime’ to ‘Now we have a life,'” said the determined deputy, who owns a dog himself.
The POV footage, uploaded to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page, shows Gregorek shattering the windows of the smoking SUV with a baton before pulling the distressed doggo, named Hank, to safety.
The self-proclaimed “dog parent” painted the nail-biting scene in the Facebook clip:
“Hank comes to the back window, he’s salivating, you can tell that he’s in distress,” Gregorek described. “[The] owner was trying to pull him out, not successfully.”
The lawman continued, “That’s his baby, I’m not going to get in his way while he’s trying to rescue his baby but the second he opens up an opening for me I just went in there and grabbed on and his body had already started to tense up, so I knew he was really in a bad way.”
Despite the danger from the smoke and fire, “nothing else really mattered at that point other than getting Hank out of the car,” Gregorek concluded.
Following the golden retrieval, the officer reportedly ran the dog out into the snow and informed the firefighters that Hank was clear of the blaze, per the cop’s account. Meanwhile, one of the neighbors, who’d given Gregorek a drink of water as he saw him coughing, had informed him that his wife was a veterinarian and could examine the pooch when she got home.
“She checked him out, checked his gums,” said Hank’s guardian angel, although he explained that by the time she’d arrived, the lucky pup was already up and “sprinting around the backyard ready to play.”
“I went over and gave him a good pet and he’s good,” the deputy added.
Social media was quick to shower Gregorek with praise for his good deed.
“Wow, what a wonderful happy ending!” fawned one fur fan on Facebook. “Great job, Deputy! You brought tears to every dog lovers eyes with this rescue!”
Another wrote, “Thank you for treating our dogs like valued members of our community.”
“I’m without words, but have plenty of tears,” gushed one dog lover. “DCSD does so much that goes unrecognized and unappreciated. Beyond grateful for your service.”
This paw patroller, for one, claims that he’ll never hesitate to save a pet in peril.
“I would’ve done the same thing whether it be baby, human, dog, cat,” Gregorek declared. “A life is a life. You kind of treat it as such in a situation like that.”
In a similarly harrowing — albeit unconventional — rescue last month, UK rescuers deployed a sausage-carrying drone to save a mutt that had become stranded for days on a treacherous mudbank amid an incoming tide.