Some men might have waited for the fire department to arrive, but when Suffolk Police Officer Marc Drouillard got to a home on Lee Street on Sunday and saw smoke coming from the second-story windows, he kicked in the locked front door and ran inside.

Drouillard was the first person on the scene after dispatchers received a call that the house, which contains four apartments, was on fire. Dispatchers had reported that the caller had seen a woman on the second-floor balcony. When he arrived at the scene, however, Drouillard did not see anybody there.

It would have been easy for him to have concluded that the woman had escaped or for him to have hesitated in the knowledge that firefighters would arrive in moments, suited up and ready to go into the burning building with special equipment and specialized training for such situations.

Instead, he tried the front door, found it locked and made a split-second decision that very likely saved the life of a woman who had been unable to escape the structure because she didn’t have her key to the deadbolt on the front door.

Drouillard’s next decision put his own life in danger, but in a heroic moment, he put aside the fear that would have been wholly understandable in the situation. He kicked in the door and headed inside to find the woman and get her out of danger. And then he went back inside to look for her cat, but the smoke and fire in the room where the conflagration had started overwhelmed him, and he had to leave the house.

“Officer Drouillard went above and beyond the call of duty to assist a member of our community,” Suffolk Police Chief Thomas Bennett said in a press release. “He should be commended for his heroic actions and a job well done.”

Indeed.