NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Davyon Johnson, 11, could not quite understand it: The pizza party, the accolades from the mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma, his picture in the newspaper and on television. Why, the sixth grader asked his mother, was he being rewarded for doing the right thing?

"I told him, 'you saved two people's lives'," said Ms LaToya Johnson, Davyon's mother. "'That is special'."

And so began a whirlwind December for Davyon, who lives in Muskogee, Oklahoma, who was honoured by his community this month for saving the life of a fellow student who was choking and an older woman who was escaping a house fire, both on Dec 9.

The Muskogee Police Department and Muskogee County Sheriff's Office presented Davyon with a certificate on Dec 15, naming him an honorary member of their forces.

"Always willing to help, always just a friend to everyone," Ms Latricia Dawkins, the principal at Dayvon's school in the Muskogee public school district, said on Sunday (Dec 26).

On the morning of Dec 9, Davyon was by the water fountain at school when he heard a seventh-grade boy say: "I'm choking."

A cap from a water bottle had slipped into his throat, Ms Dawkins said.

Davyon wrapped his arms around the student's abdomen and performed the Heimlich manoeuvre, a technique he had learnt on YouTube. He squeezed the boy's abdomen three times before the cap flew out.

Then about 5pm that day, Ms Johnson and her son were on the road when they spotted smoke coming from a house.

"I didn't think nothing of it, but he was like, 'No, Momma, this is a house on fire'," Ms Johnson recalled her son saying.

She turned the car around, and there was a small fire near the back of the house.

Davyon knocked on the front door.

Five people stepped outside, saw what was happening and ran, Ms Johnson said. A sixth person, however, was having trouble. She was older and was using a walker.

"She wasn't moving fast enough," Davyon said. "So I've got to kind of help her get to her truck because everybody was leaving."

They arrived at the woman’s truck. The sun was setting, and church services would begin soon, so Davyon said goodbye to the woman, whom he didn’t know, and got into his mother’s car. As they prepared to pull away, he looked out the window and could see the red and white flashing lights of a fire truck.

He had seen this before. When he was 8 years old, he watched his father enter a burning apartment complex in Muskogee to make sure everyone was safe. His father, Mr Willie James Logan, was not a firefighter, but he had done the right thing that day, Davyon said.

“I look up to my dad,” he said.

On Aug 19, Davyon’s father died from Covid-19. He was 52.

Unless asked by others, Davyon does not tell people what he did Dec 9. And when he is asked, he describes it all briefly, without fuss.

“The right thing to do.” That’s how he puts it.

But there was one person he did want to tell. One morning this month, he put on his sneakers and gray hoodie and went to the cemetery to see his father.

He squatted, picked at the dirt and started to tell the stories, beginning with the scene at the water fountain.