The Romanian teen who went headfirst into a well to save a toddler just became a professional firefighter.
In April 2013, a three-year-old boy named Gabriel fell into a well in the yard of his family’s home in Segarcea, a small town in Dolj County, Romania. The well was about 15 meters deep and barely wide enough for a slender teenager to squeeze through. Professional rescue crews arrived quickly. They tried everything available to them: shovels, a tractor, specialized equipment, different angles of approach. None of it worked. Hours passed.
After eleven hours, according to accounts that circulated widely at the time via CVL Press in Romania, a firefighter finally said aloud what everyone had started to fear: “There’s no more hope. The well is too narrow.”
At that moment, a 14-year-old boy named Cristian Marian Becheanu stepped forward. He was a seventh-grade student from the area, thin enough to fit where the adults could not. He told the crew he wasn’t afraid. He said he would go in.
They strapped a headlamp to his forehead, tied a rope to his ankles, and lowered him into the dark shaft headfirst.
Cristian went down with his arms stretched out in front of him so he could reach Gabriel once he found him. Somewhere in the dark, 15 meters below the surface, he did. When he emerged from the well with the three-year-old alive in his arms, the crowd that had gathered over those eleven hours erupted. Gabriel was taken immediately to hospital, where doctors monitored him for cervical spine injury and signs of oxygen deprivation. He recovered.
Reflecting on what he’d done, Cristian was characteristically understated. “I did what had to be done,” he wrote on Instagram. “I am proud of that act.” He also admitted, in accounts translated from the Romanian press, that he had been afraid at first. “But then I wasn’t,” he said.
Romania celebrated him. Local and regional officials honored Cristian at a ceremony at the Dolj County Prefecture. He received diplomas, a bicycle, a tablet, and a monthly stipend from the Artego Humanitarian Foundation through the end of 2013. Most significantly, county officials pledged support for the thing he said he actually wanted: to become a firefighter. As Alina Ionescu, director of the County Directorate for Sport and Youth, confirmed to CVL Press at the time, the institutions were committed to helping him pursue that path. Cristian is also the only civilian ever to receive the emblem of the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, Romania’s highest emergency services honor, as reported by Romanian press in 2021.
He kept his promise. More than a decade after that night in Segarcea, Cristian Marian Becheanu is now Sergeant Major Cristian Marian Becheanu, a professional firefighter and rescuer with ISU Dolj, Dolj County’s official emergency inspectorate. He is married with children of his own.
The video of the rescue has resurfaced online repeatedly over the years, and its current wave of circulation is doing what it always does: stopping people mid-scroll. The details that get people every time are the ones the headlines often skip. That the well was 50 feet deep. That he went in headfirst. That a rope on his ankles was all that connected him to the surface. That two other volunteers stepped up before him, looked into that dark shaft, and decided they couldn’t do it.
Cristian decided he could.
