Phoenix, Ariz., police officer Natalie Simonick recently spotted a teenager who was walking down the street in a desolate neighborhood late at night. When she asked him what he was doing, Christian Felix, 18, said he missed the bus, so he was walking the nine miles home from his job at McDonald’s. Simonick, 46, offered him a ride home, and became increasingly impressed. Felix didn’t drink or smoke, and had never been in trouble with the police. She asked why he didn’t ride a bike home, and when he replied that he didn’t own a bike, and had never learned to ride one, she gave him her spare. Simonick also arranged for her employer, the Phoenix Police Department, to give him a bike-riding lesson. Suffice it to say, the teen was grateful. “It’s really something when someone comes off on the street and offers to do a kindness for you,” Felix said. “These days you don’t see anything like that.” Felix’s benefactor told the Phoenix TV station that she’d like to keep helping. “If everybody could help just one person in the world like this,” said Simonick. “I think it would definitely be a better place to live.” And teenagers, with an April 2013 unemployment rate of 24.1 percent, could use that kind of random help even more than the population at large. Hopefully, stories this one, and that of Jhaqueil Reagan, become more common. In the case of Reagan, also 18, he was hiking the 10 miles through an ice storm just to interview for a minimum wage job at an Indiana thrift store. He stopped to ask a man for directions, and confessed that he couldn’t afford the bus; his mother had died and he’d been taking care of his siblings. The stranger, as it turned out, happened to be the owner of a local restaurant and offered Reagan a job at twice whatever the store would pay.
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Arizona Cop Gives Bike to Kid Who Walks Nine Miles to Work
