Citizen of Courage Erin Wilkerson honored at District Attorney Ceremony
The Courage Quotient
On a quiet Monday in San Diego’s Liberty Station—a repurposed naval base now reshaped into a civic and cultural village—the ballroom at the Conference Center filled with applause, not for celebrities or politicians, but for citizens who did something rare in the calculus of modern life: they ran toward danger.
It was the 35th annual Citizens of Courage Awards, and each honoree had that unknowable thing inside them—whatever it is that compels someone to override their own safety, their own fear, and instead act with a kind of desperate grace.
“They were all called upon to save a life,” said District Attorney Summer Stephan, the afternoon’s emcee and moral witness, “and somehow found the courage within them.”
Each name called was followed by a story, and each story felt less like news than parable.
The Survivor Who Became a Sentinel
When Erin Wilkerson was arrested in a San Diego hotel room in 2019, she didn’t know the language to describe what had happened to her. She learned the word later: trafficking.
Years of exploitation had trained her not to speak, not to hope. And yet, since then, Wilkerson has become one of the region’s most vital and unflinching educators—teaching law enforcement and prosecutors what coercion, control, and survival look like from the inside out. “It’s not hard to treat someone like a human,” she told the audience.
“At the end of the day, that is the message I want received.” Detective Dan Dierdoff of the San Diego Police Department, who first met Wilkerson in her lowest moment, put it this way: “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as strong as her in my career.”
The Mother and the Cliff
One of those names was Jenna Brians. In the summer of 2020, Brians received a text from her estranged husband, Robert, showing their two-year-old twin daughters strapped in the front seat of his car—unbuckled, unsecured. The message said goodbye.
He intended to drive them into the Pacific Ocean. Jenna got in her own car and drove—straight into terror, fueled only by what she later called her “mother core.”
That day, her daughters survived because she had the clarity to call the police, the stamina to reason with a man in psychological collapse, and the resolve to stay in the story—afterward, in court, and in the trauma-laced work of testifying.
She doesn’t see herself as a hero. “Just a lucky mom who gets to watch her daughters grow up,” she said. Her former husband is now serving 31 years in state prison for kidnapping and attempted murder.
Her daughters are alive.
A Freeway, A Gunman, A Choice
On a spring evening in 2022, four drivers—Loay Yousif, Francisco Sesma, Hunter Nemeth, and James Carver—became an impromptu militia of decency when they stopped on Interstate 8 and found a California Highway Patrol officer bleeding beside his cruiser. The shooter was still there.
He had just tried to execute Officer Antonio Pacheco with the officer’s own weapon. Yousif tackled the suspect. Sesma, seeing the struggle, emerged from his vehicle with a pocketknife, helping hold the assailant down. Nemeth, a nurse, knelt to Pacheco and worked to stem the bleeding, while Carver radioed for help and braced traffic. “These men didn’t plan to be heroes,” said Deputy DA Shane Waller. “They just did what needed doing.”
The Man Who Drove Toward the AK-47
It was just past midnight in Spring Valley, 2021. Robert Moore, working a night shift as a private security guard, was driving to work when he saw a figure step from a car with an assault rifle and open fire into a family vehicle.
Moore turned toward the scene.
The mother, Karmen Anderson, was dying. The father and daughter were in shock. The sedan was on fire. Moore put the mother in his car and raced her to the hospital himself. She passed away two days later—but she had a chance, because someone ran toward the gunfire.
Moore stayed on the scene, cooperating with law enforcement, helping piece together a case that would end with the killer receiving life in prison. “He didn’t hesitate,” said Deputy DA Kerry Conway. “He acted when it mattered most.”
What defines courage?
It is not an absence of fear, nor is it rooted in ego. What these seven individuals exhibited was something closer to moral instinct—an uncalculated, often irrational commitment to do something when it’s easier, and safer, to do nothing.
In a culture too often focused on grandstanding, the Citizens of Courage Awards offer a counter-narrative: small moments, harrowing decisions, and people who didn’t wait for someone else to act.
As District Attorney Summer Stephan closed the event, she offered no platitudes. Just quiet thanks. And maybe that’s what bravery deserves: not spectacle, but witness.
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