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Image: Facebook/Jennifer Foster
BY JASMINE BAILEY
One New York police officer is warming
the hearts of people all around the country— all because he warmed the feet of one person.
Here’s CNN.
“Officer Lawrence Deprimo kneeling down
on a cold night in New York last week to put new boots on a homeless man, he’s 25-years-old.
The officer bought them after noticing the man was barefoot and talked to him for a while.
His
act of kindness would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for Jennifer Foster, a tourist
from Arizona. She took the picture on her cell phone and posted it to the NYPD’s Facebook
page.
That photo, posted on Tuesday, now has
more than 317 thousand likes, 74 thousand shares and 19 thousand comments. Upon posting
the picture Foster wrote…
“(I) saw a shoeless man asking for change.
Right when I was about to approach, one of your officers came up behind him. The officer
said, ‘I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on
and take care of you.’ …I was never so impressed in my life.”
The New York
Times reports the officer wasn’t warned before the picture was posted online— he
didn’t know the picture was even taken. In an interview he said…
“It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet…I had two
pairs of socks and I was still cold…He was the most polite gentleman I had met… (his
face lit up at the sight of the boots)…As soon as the boots were on him, he went on
his way, and I just went back to my post.”
Officer Deprimo never got the man’s name but he
says he keeps the receipt inside his police jacket to remind him there are people who
have it worse than he does.