Teen returned wallet with $300 to the rightful owner — stranger rewards him with the electric bike he'd been saving for
It is always wholesome when a person gets rewarded for their good deeds. A Chandler teen got that reward in the form of an electric bike he had been saving for quite some time. It came as a gift from a stranger after he helped return a person's wallet with $300. The 14-year-old boy was riding his bike near Queen Creek Road and Arizona Avenue in Chandler when he found a person's wallet on the road and decided to find the rightful owner, per AZ Family.
The teen, Cody Chalmers, spotted the wallet and knew what he would do with it. "I thought that someone would feel really bad if they lost it, so I was like, I better return this." The boy sent a photo of a woman's ID to his mom and called her about the lost wallet. They searched social media and public records websites to find the woman. "She said that she lost it around 30 minutes before I found it and she was really glad that someone like me found it and that it didn’t get stolen." The wallet had the woman's driver's license, credit cards, health insurance cards and $300 in cash. Cody's mom, Carrie Strecker, was quite impressed that her son didn't take the money, even when he was saving up for an off-road e-bike for months.
The bike that the boy liked cost $4,000, so the proud mom posted about the incident on a Facebook group. "It seemed impossible. An impossible save for him, but he’s been trying so hard so I mentioned in my post that here was this opportunity for him to be able to get what he’s been trying so hard to save for and he could have just walked away with it and nobody really would have known any different and it didn’t even occur to him," the mom pointed out. So when a neighbor the family isn't acquainted with saw the post, they wanted to do something to reward the boy for his honesty. "He was like, 'Your motivation and integrity would get you far in life, so that’s why I bought you this,'" Cody said, recounting his neighbor's words.
Cody eventually got his dream bike, ironically from a store called 'Integrity' E-bikes. The teen decided to return the wallet because he had seen how his dad felt when he lost his wallet some time back. "It kind of taught me how bad it is to like take someone’s money because their wallet is basically their life." He added, "Do the right thing and you will get good things back." The kid thanked his mom and dad for being good examples in his life. "Well, thank you, Dad, for teaching me to return things and Mom." The mom shared her son's story because of the common teen violence incidents in the East Valley. She wanted to highlight that there were still plenty of kids who wanted to do good things.
At first, the mom had turned down the stranger's offer because she thought it was "way too generous," per Inside Edition. But the person, Adam Bailey, insisted on doing it. The boy was at school when everything happened and was quite surprised by the gift. Bailey expressed that he did it because he was really proud of Cody. The teen shared that he already had 150 miles on the bike in less than a week of owning it.