06/15/2026
On the afternoon of July 26, 2020, a sixteen-year-old girl from Guelph, Ontario, named Jamey Ruth Klassen was at Sunset Point Beach in Collingwood with her family.
She overheard someone nearby calling 911.
A forty-year-old man named Christopher Robertson had been kayaking on Georgian Bay. His kayak had taken on water and capsized. He had clung to the hull for a time, called for help, and then gone under.
The caller on the phone was trying to keep their composure for the dispatcher.
Jamey stood up.
She had spent the previous summer in lifeguard training. She had been planning to complete the certification that very season. The pandemic had cancelled the courses before she could finish. She held the technique in her body without yet holding the credential.
She ran for the water.
The kayak was about six hundred feet from shore. Six hundred feet is roughly twice the length of an American football field, in open water, in a lake that even in July is cold enough to limit how long an adult body can stay in it.
She swam to the kayak. Robertson was not there. She looked down through the clear cold water of Georgian Bay.
He was on the bottom, about twelve feet below her, motionless.
She took a breath and dove.
She found him, hooked her arms under his, and brought him to the surface. He was not breathing. She positioned him on his back with his head on her shoulder, locked one arm across his chest, and began to swim them both toward shore using her other arm and her legs.
Six hundred feet, in the opposite direction, with the dead weight of an adult man.
She made it most of the way.
When she could no longer make headway, she shouted for help. A man on a paddleboard out on the bay heard her and came across. They got Robertson up onto the board. The paddleboarder took him toward shore. Jamey, too exhausted to continue carrying him, swam the rest of the way separately.
Paramedics from the Collingwood and Blue Mountains Ontario Provincial Police service had reached the beach. They started CPR on the sand. Robertson came back. He was taken by ambulance to hospital and was treated for what doctors classified as critical condition on arrival. He survived. He recovered, by his own subsequent statements to Jamey, without lasting brain injury.
He called her at Christmas that year, and again at New Year's, to say thank you.
This is the part of the story the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission verified, document by document, across the next year. The Commission, based in Pittsburgh, is the institution that gives out the Carnegie Medal — the oldest and most prestigious civilian award for life-saving heroism in the United States and Canada. The medal is given only to people who consciously and voluntarily risked their own life to save another, with no obligation to act and no reasonable expectation of survival on a routine basis. The criteria are strict. The investigations are thorough. The Commission has been awarding the medal continuously since Andrew Carnegie endowed it in 1904.
On June 23, 2021, the Commission announced its summer 2021 class of recipients. There were eighteen people in it, sixteen American and two Canadian. Jamey Ruth Klassen, then seventeen, was one of the two Canadians. The Commission president, Eric Zahren, said in the announcement that when you see a sixteen-year-old willing to risk her life for a stranger, the maturity it implies gives you hope for the future.
The medal came with a $5,500 educational grant.
Jamey used it for her first year of nursing school at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
She had told reporters, when asked about the award, only that she hoped what she had done would inspire other people to act selflessly. She did not do extended interviews. She did not appear on national television. She declined the larger versions of the celebrity arc that her age and her story would have made available, and went to nursing school. She has spoken publicly very little about it in the years since.
The lifeguard certification, the one the pandemic had cancelled, she finished as soon as the courses were available again.
The point of the story, the one the Carnegie Commission documents so carefully each year, is that the rescue happened in real time. She heard the 911 call. She ran. She swam six hundred feet. She dove twelve feet down. She got him to the surface. She swam most of the way back carrying a man heavier than she was. She did all of it in the time it took the paramedics to drive to the beach, and she did it with the partial training she had completed before the world had decided that swimming pools were not a public health priority.
She was sixteen. She is in her early twenties now. She is, by all accounts, becoming a nurse.
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