Marine rushes into burning Okinawa hotel to alert sleeping occupants

CHATAN, Okinawa — As bystanders recorded a hotel burning in the predawn darkness, a 25-year-old Marine ran inside, pounding on doors and shouting to wake sleeping occupants.

Lance Cpl. Marshall Martinez, of Fillmore, Calif., said he was walking home with his girlfriend in Chatan town early Aug. 15 when he noticed flames spreading through the nearby Hotel Hamby Resort.

“You got to do something because every second counts,” he told Stars and Stripes during a Friday interview at Camp Courtney.

“I saw people evacuating [but] there’s probably still people in there sleeping,” he said. “I went in there banging on doors, yelling ‘fire, fire, fire!’ ”

Okinawa Prefectural Police received a report of the fire at 3:30 a.m., a police spokesman said by phone Wednesday.

Lance Cpl. Marshall Martinez poses at Camp Courtney, Okinawa, Aug. 21, 2026. He helped people evacuate from a burning Okinawa hotel the previous week. (Ryan M. Breeden/Stars and Stripes)

An early morning fire at Hotel Hamby Resort in Chatan, Okinawa, was extinguished by 7:19 a.m. on Aug. 15, 2026. (Ryan M. Breeden/Stars and Stripes)

Martinez — a combat engineer with III Marine Expeditionary Force Battalion, III MEF Information Group — said he saw about 10 people safely leave the hotel before he went back outside and contacted emergency responders.

Then a flashlight shining from a window caught his attention.

“Our assumption is that there’s probably a person there,” he said. “We can’t go through the door anymore because it’s engulfed in flames. We’re going to try the window.”

Martinez said he and other bystanders attempted to reach the person through the window but were driven back by smoke and heat.

Then they tried another approach.

“We decided to rip off the wall,” Martinez said. “That’s when local [police] came with their wooden pry bar, and then we started ripping off the wall.”

Firefighters subsequently entered the hotel and removed an unconscious 55-year-old man from Osaka prefecture, the police spokesman said.

The fire was completely extinguished at 7:19 a.m., and its cause remains under investigation, according to police.

Local authorities are still determining how many people, including U.S. personnel, assisted during the emergency, according to an Okinawa city police spokesman.

One person associated with the U.S. military was taken to a military hospital but was not injured, he said by phone Wednesday.

Some Japanese government officials must speak to the media only on condition of anonymity.

Martinez said his decision to enter the burning building came down to what he would want someone else to do if the situation were reversed.

“Jump towards action; don’t be a bystander,” he said. “If your neighbor needs help, help them.”