Temar Boggs is a 16-year-old high school freshman who likes chemistry and social studies. He plays football, basketball, and track. He'd like to study culinary arts in college and, if that doesn't work, he'll like to try his hand at custom sneaker art. He's tall, lean and quiet, with alert eyes.
And though he arrived in town just this summer, students greeted him on his first day of high school as "hero."
Boggs, of Lancaster, Pa., earned the title this summer when his new neighborhood rang with the sounds of police sirens and alarmed adults. A 5-year-old had been seen getting into a maroon car and hadn't been seen since, setting off an Amber alert.
Boggs and friends formed an impromptu search party and walked the neighborhood, but found nothing. When Boggs returned home, there was still no sign of the girl. He wasn't done looking.
"I'm not a little girl, but I like to think that if I was in trouble people would keep looking for me," the teen said while walking the streets of his neighborhood on a recent afternoon.
Boggs borrowed a bike from a friend and headed out with his friend Chris Garcia. "We went farther than we had on foot," said Boggs. "I had a feeling in my gut that she wasn't that far away."
Boggs had gotten ahead of Garcia when he saw a maroon car and started to follow it. It seemed to be trying to avoid the police cars and looking for a way out of a neighborhood made up of lots of townhomes, and lots of cul de sacs. It was moving in starts and stops.
When the car approached a police car and some volunteer firefighters on the side of the road, it turned around and passed a trailing Boggs. The teen looked in the car and saw a small girl in the front seat.
"She looked like the description, so I knew it was her," he said. "She looked like she was looking for someone."
Boggs says he never thought about the possibility the car could wheel around on him. "Nah," he says. "I was thinking that I would keep following the car till we got her back."
Boggs had no idea how he was going to do that, but he kept following.
The car accelerated down a hill, pulled to a stop sign, the passenger side door opened, and the girl popped out.
"I threw down the bike and ran to her," he said.
She asked for her mom, Boggs lifted her on his shoulder and carried her a couple blocks to where the cops and the adults were.
With that, Boggs was a hero. The local paper showed up, followed by local TV, followed by CNN. Followed by a couple thousand Facebook fans. And gifts. A Playstation 3 just arrived. The local Walmart sent over a bike. It was quite a reception for a young man, now 16, whose family had settled in town a month earlier.
The family set up a PO Box to handle the items people sent. Their mailbox bulged with letters from Ireland, from Australia--and a manilla envelope from Beloit, Wisconsin, stuffed with construction paper artwork from Miss Schoville's fifth-grade summer school class.
One item shows a young man in a cape.
Another "Freind me on Facebook" (still some work to do, Miss Schoville).
One has a heart, outlined in green, filled with red.
One says, "Thank you hero Temar."
"It was kinda amazing," says Boggs.
Thank you, indeed.
Click here to meet the rest of our Every Day Heroes.
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