GOOD DEEDS REPAID
He Returned Her Purse And Got Back His Life
For many, an act of kindness is its own reward. But these five Samaritans found their selflessness answered in ways they never could have imagined.
hat brought Aeric Mccoy to that Baltimore alley was, by his own admission, nothing to be proud of. Mccoy was looking for a safe place to do drugs. He had been there for only a minute or so
Wwhen something clearly out of place caught his eye: a brown leather Rioni handbag, the kind found in high-end stores. “It was like it materialized out of nowhere,” Mccoy says. When he picked it up, he found that it had been emptied of everything but an electric bill. “I thought, This person is probably missing this right now.”
For many, an act of kindness is its own reward.
But these five Samaritans found their selflessness answered in ways they could never have imagined.
“I'm just trying to help someone who helped me,” says Kaitlyn Smith, with Aeric Mccoy.
Mccoy, 36, could relate all too well. One of his few possessions, the sleeping bag he used as his bed in an abandoned house, had recently been stolen. Remembering how angered he’d been by his own loss, he resolved to return the purse to its owner.
He began right away, starting with the address on the electric bill. It was on the other side of the city, a subway ride and a long walk away. En route, a couple of people asked to buy the purse from him, but he declined. “I’m returning this to its owner,” he told them.
After traveling much of the day and finally approaching the address on the bill, he was stopped by a woman on the street. She asked whether she could buy the purse. Again, Mccoy refused, saying he was searching for its owner. “But I am the owner,” the woman said. “That’s my purse.”
A month earlier, on June 12, 2017, Kaitlyn Smith, 29, a sales representative for a vascular medical device company, had woken up to find that her apartment had been broken into and her purse stolen. Now she happened across a tall, disheveledlooking man clutching it. “If it [had been] a woman, I wouldn’t have looked twice,” Smith says. “But it was a man, and I could tell he wasn’t in good shape. He seemed exhausted and looked sick.”
At Smith’s urging, Mccoy told her his story. He’d been in charge of a landscaping business until 2012, when he was in a car accident that left him addicted to narcotics.
Smith, amazed this stranger had gone to such great lengths to return her bag, asked whether there was anything she could do to help. “I’m a heroin addict,” Mccoy warned. “I don’t want to intrude on your life; I’m probably gonna let you down.”
Undaunted, Smith gave him her phone number, saying, “If you want help, if you want to go to rehab, call me.” She replaced his lost sleeping bag with her own, then drove him back to his neighborhood and left, thinking that would be the end of it. Two days later, she got a call.
Smith realized that Mccoy was serious about getting better; he even gave her the name of a 28-day rehab facility in Florida he’d heard about. So she dug into her savings account and bought Mccoy a plane ticket to Florida. While there, he would call her to let her know how he was doing. “We were getting to know each other,” Smith says. “I heard his
“I’m an addict,” Mccoy warned Smith. “I’m probably gonna let you down.”
transformation over the phone. Every day he would call me for ten minutes, and it went from this scared, desperate voice to a healthy, vibrant voice.”
After 28 days there and a 90-day stint at a rehab program at Johns Hopkins Hospital (his stay was paid for with financial aid, and his flight home was courtesy of an anonymous donor), Mccoy is drug-free. He lives at a residential recovery center in Baltimore, and a Gofundme page set up by Smith has covered his rent, groceries, and incidentals. He plans to get his associate’s degree in landscape architecture. His life is back on track, all because one crime victim could empathize with another’s loss.