Video of police officer giving barefoot man pair of shoes goes viral
A New Jersey police officer wasn’t looking for attention when he gave a barefoot man who had been kicked off a bus a new pair of shoes on Saturday. But Kayla Palmer, who witnessed the officer’s random act of kindness, had other ideas.
“That was nice of you,” Palmer told the officer, Kenya Joyner of the Delaware River Port Authority, as she filmed the scene with her cellphone. “I wanna shake your hand. You’re gonna go viral!”
“Oh, come on,” Joyner replied.
She was right. Palmer’s video of Joyner’s gesture has been viewed more than 930,000 times since she posted it to Facebook.
According to Palmer, the unidentified shoe recipient had been booted from the bus at the Port Authority Transit Corporation stop in Lindenwold, N.J.
“My dad saw the man get kicked off the bus,” Palmer told NBC Philadelphia. “He didn’t have any shoes on. I came up and he was telling me about it.”
The officer first approached the man and then left, returning a few minutes later.
“We thought he was gonna tell him to leave,” Palmer said. “Instead he came out with a box of shoes.”
While Joyner clearly wasn’t looking for the spotlight, Palmer felt he deserved one.
“He needed some recognition,” she said. “Because you do see some of those negative stories.”
It’s not the first time a police officer’s shoe-giving has gone viral.
In 2012, a photo of a New York Police Department officer kneeling down to give a barefoot man in Times Square a pair of boots on a cold November night was shared more than a million times on Facebook.
The officer, Lawrence DePrimo, was working counterterrorism duty in Times Square when he saw what appeared to be a homeless man without shoes sitting on 42nd Street. DePrimo left and then returned with a pair of $100 boots that he bought at a nearby Skechers store.
“It was freezing out, and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” DePrimo told the New York Times.
But even heartwarming stories can take a cold turn. Jeffrey Hillman, the shoeless man many assumed was homeless, wasn’t homeless at all.
Hillman had a Bronx apartment paid for via a combination of rent vouchers, Social Security and military veteran benefits.
He told the Daily News that despite access to federally subsidized shelter, it was his choice to wander the streets.
“I guess you could say I am hard-headed,” Hillman told the newspaper.
“Our door is always open to him,” Hillman’s brother, Kirk, added. “But this is a lifestyle he’s chosen.”
