What happened in Sylmar on August 7, 2019 was not a performance. There was no script. There was no director. There were no multiple takes. There was a crashed car, a trapped child, a trapped grandmother, and a Wednesday afternoon. The choice to go toward the car was made in the moment, without preparation, without professional guidance, without the safety net that performance provides.
The choice was available to make because of the person Trejo had built, over fifty years, through the repeated daily choices that constitute a life. The sobriety, the counseling, the juvenile hall visits, the philosophy about helping — these were not preparation for the Sylmar rescue in any tactical sense. They were not a training regimen for emergency situations. They were the accumulated product of a man deciding, every day for fifty years, to be the kind of person who helps.
That kind of person, when a car crashes in front of him, goes to the car.
Monica Jackson also went to the car. The unidentified man who helped open the rear door also went to the car. The LAFD firefighters arrived and did the professional work that professional training had prepared them to do. The rescue was collaborative, and its success was collaborative.
What Trejo brought to it was what fifty years of the same choice produces: not special skills, not heroic exceptional nature, but the ordinary-extraordinary quality of a person who has practiced caring enough that the practice has become the reflex. He went to the car because going to the car is what he does. He kept the child calm because keeping frightened people calm is something he has been doing, in juvenile halls and recovery meetings and community centers, for most of his adult life. He gave Monica Jackson credit because giving credit to the people who actually did the essential thing is part of the same orientation.