Bar owner catches teen who stole customer's wallet — then asks him to move in with his family
Sometimes a person might experience good luck in the most unexpected moment. Such a moment might also change their whole life. A homeless teen who had stolen a wallet at a bar experienced something similar because of a bar owner's kindness. It all began with the owner's continued search for a stolen wallet. The woman customer who had lost it was really upset about it as it had her wedding ring inside. The bar owner looked for it with determination and along the way, inspired a teen, reported CBS News.
The owner, Jimmy Gilleece, runs the bar Jimmy's in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and believes in going above and beyond for his customers. So, he decided to do the same for the woman who had lost her wallet. "She was frantic, really upset about it, so it just became my mission," the man told the outlet. Jimmy began by looking through hours of security footage to figure out where the wallet might have been. After three hours, he spotted the wallet on a bench outside the bar. A person was seen coming close to the wallet in the footage. The bar owner knew who the person was and got him to admit that he had taken the cash and thrown the wallet in a channel.
The man was quite disappointed that even after finding out the person who stole the wallet, he couldn't get what he was looking for. But he decided to keep going and called for divers to find the wallet and the ring from the ocean channel. The next day, the divers came in to search the sea bed and retrieved the soggy wallet and the wedding ring. But even after one thing was solved, the man decided to look further and transform the life of the teen who had stolen the wallet in the first place. "He was living in the woods and this is when it was 30 degrees outside. And he hadn't eaten in two days. I could tell he wasn't a criminal. He was just somebody who needed a little help," Jimmy explained.
17-year-old Rivers Prather was trying to make it on his own after being estranged from his mom, but he had been struggling for some time now. "I couldn't have been luckier. Most other people would have just given the footage to police and he chose to help me. He's made me part of his family," Prather expressed. The kid ended up moving in with the man in his house, where he lived with his fiancee and kids. The bar owner also offered work to the teen, who then started helping around the bar.
The boy expressed that he would do anything for Gilleece because of what he did for him. The teen even tried to do something nice for the bar owner's family by relocating a baby raccoon from their garbage can but had to deal with an angry mother raccoon. The footage was caught on camera and showed that the teen had an intention to help after all, as per the outlet. "I’m not a bad person. I just made a bad choice," Prather told WWAYTV3. He might have landed behind bars for felony charges for 15 years if Gilleece had not given him a chance. The customer also decided to drop the charges after learning about Prather's story. "He gave himself a second chance too. Just, you know, stepping up. Admitting he did wrong, and basically fixing the problem," the bar owner pointed out.