Belfast - Alan Perkins will admit he's made some mistakes in his life.

Now he's trying to get back on the right track as a resident at the Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center in Belfast.

It was a short walk from there to the foot bridge along the waterfront that saved a boy's life.

A Sunday stroll in May turned Alan Perkins into a Red Cross Real Hero.

"There was quite a few people down there a little ways all looking over the edge," said Perkins. " And then all the cop cars come from behind me and down the hill and then I just heard he couldn't swim."

So Alan Perkins ran down the footbridge to see for himself what was going on. "Saw this kid that was holding on to one of the piers off the footbridge because he fell in I guess and hypothermia was kicking in and he just kept going under water, pulling himself up. He couldn't swim and he had fully clothes on."

With a dozen or more people standing on the pier watching, it became clear to Alan this could end badly. "I knew I had to do something quick because he was having a hard time holding himself up above water, he kept going under water, pulling himself up coughing and stuff. He's turning bluish, so I knew it was just a matter of time and the tide was going too and started going and the more the tide drops the more the current gets there and the more he was going to have a hard time to hold on."

Alan took off his shoes and shirt, hopped over the railing that reads Danger, Keep Out, and jumped from the concrete footing onto the board near the boy. "Landed right and just crawled down that and reached down and pulled the kid. He was actually going underwater for like the fourth or fifth time since I was doing all this real quick and I reached down and I grabbed him by the hooded sweatshirt and part of the hair of the head and pulled him up."

Then it was a matter of holding on to the pier and the boy until help arrived, said Perkins. "I stayed right down there holding this kid up, submerged out of water for like ten minutes until a boat finally showed up and got him in the boat."

Alan just thinks he was in the right place at the right time and he didn't run down that footbridge and jump the gate to be a hero. "No you definitely don't think like that at that point in time and I really don't think I was a hero. I just did something that I hoped somebody else would do. Done a lot of bad things in my life and a positive thing like this makes you feel good."

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