Dr. James Betts risked death to save the life of a young child trapped under the debris of a crushed freeway following the October San Francisco earthquake.

Lester Moren Perez rode a sailboard to freedom from Cuba.Cai Jinqing was a student spokeswoman during the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in China.

Stanislav Levchenko and Alexandra Costa defected from Russia.

If courage is a primary element of heroism, then these five people qualify as bona fide heroes. In honor of their heroic feats, each will be presented with a Freedom Award June 22 at the annual Mayor's Ball and Awards Gala sponsored by America's Freedom Festival at Provo.

Dance music will be provided by the Joe Muscolino Band, and entertainment will be provided by award-winning composer, songwriter and performer Kurt Bestor.

-As aftershocks continued to rumble through San Francisco last October, Betts, a pediatric surgeon, crawled through the rubble of the Nimitz Freeway following the cries of an injured child trapped in the wreckage of buckled freeway and twisted cars. Betts worked with a scalpel in the darkness to amputate the leg of 6-year-old Julio Berumen, trapped inside his mother's crushed car. Through this act of courage and several hours of surgery that followed, Betts saved Julio's life and became one of thousands of Bay area heroes that night.

-Perez fled Cuba on the evening of March 1, launching his sailboard from the beach of the resort town of Varadero. Sailing through the shark-infested waters of the Straits of Florida, Perez, 17, was guided first by the stars and later by the hazy glow from concentrations of electric lights in towns beyond the horizon. His goal: the Florida Keys, some 90 miles away.

When he was 30 miles south of Key West, he was spotted by the crew of a foreign freighter, who radioed the U.S. Coast Guard. Perez subsequently received a visa from U.S. immigration officials.

-Cai, now a star basketball athlete and straight-A student at Wellesley College near Boston, is a world away from her native China where, a year ago, she had camped in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and acted as an announcer on the students' public address system. Cai also served as a guide and translator for foreign journalists during the Chinese student and worker rebellion.

Although not on the square on the day of the bloodshed - her parents had persuaded her to stay home - Cai was involved in the movement and was among the dissidents. A sympathetic teacher wrote a letter saying Cai had not been involved, and the Ministry of Public Security, not detecting the truth, issued her a U.S. visa.

-Levchenko, author of "On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB," is a former Soviet spy, and was characterized by Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta in the Washington Post as formerly being "one of the KGB's most effective agents."

During the time he was performing herculean feats for his government, however, he secretly became a Christian and grew disenchanted with the Soviet system. In October 1979 he defected in Tokyo, an event that prompted a secret military tribunal in Moscow to find him guilty of high treason and sentence him, in absentia, to death.

-Alexandra Costa married Levchenko in 1988. Costa's book, "Stepping Down From the Star," tells her story as a Soviet defector. As the former Yelena Mitrokhina, she grew up as the only child of a Soviet Air Force colonel and journalist. She was stationed at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., with her former husband, Len Mitrokhin, and defected in 1978 with her two children. She became the first Soviet defector in 30 years from the Washington, D.C., embassy.

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Tickets available

Tickets for the Mayor's Ball and Awards Gala, which will be held in the Wilkinson Center Ballroom at Brigham Young University at 7 p.m. June 22, are $25 per person or $200 per table and are available by calling 379-6100. The formal event features dinner, dancing and a patriotic slide show. Half of the tables have already been reserved.

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