Good Samaritan gives back
Tracks down owner of stolen coat he bought and returns it, but refuses owner’s reward
Wael Wahba says he was just “trying to help” when he determinedly tracked down the owner of a stolen jacket.
David Cohen, the jacket’s owner, says he was just as determined to give Wahba a reward. That effort was less successful.
One morning last week, Cohen said, he climbed into his car and saw some things from his glove box on the floor. It was then he realized he’d left his brand new jacket on the back seat the night before. And that it was gone.
“That’s brutal,” he thought. “It’s a Canadian winter jacket, they’re not cheap.”
Not only was his jacket gone, but Cohen had left his wallet in the pocket, along with all his credit cards and ID. He resigned himself to the loss, he said, and started making calls to cancel his cards on the way to work.
“I just figured I’m never seeing that again,” he said. “My car was broken into, that’s the end of it.”
But hope came later that day when Cohen got a voicemail from the con- cierge at the condominium where he used to live — he hadn’t updated the address on his driver’s licence, he said — saying there was someone at the front counter looking to return his wallet and jacket.
Cohen had missed the phone call, and Wahba had left the condo by the time he got the voicemail.
But Wahba wasn’t going to give up that easy. He managed to track down Cohen on Facebook and let him know in a message that he had the jacket and wallet at Chamsine, the St. Clair Ave. W. restaurant where he works — about a block away from Cohen’s house.
Cohen’s wife went to pick up the goods and got the full story from Wahba, a 32-year-old Egyptian immigrant who’s been in Canada for two years and had just started working at Chamsine a week before.
Wahba told the Star that a man had walked into the restaurant and said someone gave him the coat because he was homeless, but that he didn’t need it
anymore. He offered it to Wahba for whatever he was able to spare, so Wahba gave the man $10. When he got home, he checked the pockets and found Cohen’s wallet — and his ID.
Cohen’s wife gave Wahba $10 to cover what he’d paid for the jacket. But when she offered him the rest of the $50 in the wallet as a reward, he would have none of it. “I told her no,” Wahba said. “He was absolutely insistent,” Cohen said.
So, in an aggressively Canadian move, Cohen went back to Chamsine himself to offer Wahba a Tim Hortons gift card. Still, no luck. “‘This is what any good person would do. It didn’t cross my mind to do anything else,’ ” Cohen remembers Wahba saying.
“I’m sure if you were in the same situation, David, you (would do) the same,” Wahba said he told Cohen.
“I told him, ‘If you find another person who is poor or who needs this money, you can give it to him.’”
Cohen said Wahba wouldn’t even let him leave the gift card on the table and walk out of the restaurant.
“He was like, ‘No, no, no. Don’t. You’re taking that gift card. Just pay it forward,’ ” Cohen said.
“I am a Muslim guy,” Wahba said. “In my religion, this is something that is called haram — not legal,” he said.
Wahba said he was determined to track Cohen down quickly so he didn’t have to go without his driver’s licence or credit cards for long.
“I (was) very sure he needs his licence, he needs his cards. ... And maybe he needs money, he needs something from his card ... he can’t drive,” he said. “So I (was) trying to help him as fast as I can, because maybe his life has stopped, his life has a problem if he doesn’t have his cards, his licence.”
Determined to do something positive for Wahba, Cohen went back to Chamsine the next day to tell Wahba’s manager what a stellar employee he had on his hands.
That was the first time he had tried the food at the Syrian restaurant, Cohen said, and he ended up loving it.
“I’ll certainly be coming back,” he said with a laugh. “It was delicious.”
“This is what any good person would do.” WAEL WAHBA GOOD SAMARITAN