He had no shoes. He didn’t even have socks. His feet were covered in blisters.
“I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold,” DePrimo later told The New York Times.
He asked the man what size shoe he wore. It was a 12.
So DePrimo walked into a Skechers store nearby and bought a pair of insulated winter boots and thermal socks. The $100 boots came to a little over $75 after the store gave him a discount.
Then he went back outside, knelt on the cold sidewalk and helped the man put them on.
“It was like you gave him a million dollars,” DePrimo said.
He had no idea anyone was watching. But a tourist from Arizona named Jennifer Foster saw the whole thing and took a photo with her phone.
Foster had worked in law enforcement for 17 years. She emailed the picture to the NYPD with a note. “The officer expected NOTHING in return and did not know I was watching,” she wrote. “I was never so impressed in my life.”
She didn’t even know the officer’s name. The department posted her photo on its Facebook page, and within days it had been liked and shared hundreds of thousands of times. Soon the young officer was on the morning TV shows.
DePrimo said he kept the receipt for the boots in his vest, “to remind me that sometimes people have it worse.”
Have you ever seen a stranger do something kind when they thought nobody was looking? Tell us in the comments.
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