“Failure Was Not An Option”: The Firefighter Who Gave Mouth-To-Snout CPR For 20 Minutes Straight

Firefighter Andrew Klein wasn’t searching for a person when he crawled through the smoke on his hands and knees inside a burning Santa Monica apartment. He was searching for a dog — a small Bichon Frise/Shih Tzu mix named Nalu Marley, trapped somewhere inside while flames tore through the building his owner had run out of moments earlier.

Klein found him a few feet from the fire, in a bedroom, lying completely still. “He was totally lifeless,” Klein said afterward. There was no time to think it through. “I picked him up and ran out of the apartment because time is key, especially with a small dog… failure was not an option.”

Outside, Crystal Lamirande — the dog’s owner and a radiology nurse — was already in tears. She had come home to find her apartment on fire and had tried desperately to get to Nalu herself, but the smoke was too thick to get past. Now she knelt on the ground nearby, watching, as Klein laid the motionless dog down and checked for signs of life. There was no pulse. He wasn’t breathing.

What happened next lasted twenty minutes, though it must have felt endless to everyone watching. Klein and his crew worked without stopping — oxygen first, then chest compressions, then something most people never picture when they think of firefighting: mouth-to-snout resuscitation, breathing directly for a dog who couldn’t breathe for himself. A bystander who happened to catch it on video described watching Klein pat the dog’s belly, coaxing him, refusing to quit even as the minutes stretched on with no response.

Then, finally, movement. Nalu began to breathe on his own. “All right, bud,” Klein said quietly, still rubbing him, encouraging him to try standing. The dog was disoriented but alive — and the sound that followed, according to those on scene, was Lamirande’s sobbing turning from grief into overwhelming relief.

Nalu spent the following 24 hours in an oxygen chamber to fully recover. When Lamirande later posted an update, her joy was impossible to miss: “Back from the dead!!!!” she wrote. “He is so thankful he is alive even though all his clothes are severely smoke damaged!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Love Nalu Marley!!!!! (And his mother Crystal.) We are forever grateful.”

Lamirande, who works in medicine herself, said she couldn’t get over how much time the firefighters had given her dog — a family member, in every sense that mattered to her. For Klein, it was simply the job: showing up for a life that needed saving, whether that life walks on two legs or four. Sometimes the most quietly heroic moments in emergency response don’t come with sirens blazing toward a person in danger — they come with a firefighter on his knees in the grass, refusing to stop until a small dog opens his eyes again.