75-year-old widow was down to $3 for gas — then a Michigan cop stepped up
Seth Kasyouhanan, who owns a Citgo gas station in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, says he caught one of those simple-yet-heartwarming, people-helping-people moments at his store last week.
It happened, he wrote in a Facebook post, after an elderly customer put $3 in change on his counter to pay for gas.
A police officer happened to be standing behind her in line to pay, the post says, and the officer watched as she slowly made her way back to the car parked at pump 3.
“He went outside and told her to sit in the car, as he would pump the gas for her,” Kasyouhanan, who goes by Seth Kazz on Facebook, wrote.
But as the two talked, 75-year-old Dolores Marotta noticed something odd. It was taking longer than she expected for Officer Todd Bing to pump the $3 worth of gas she had paid for, she told WXYZ.
“I thought, ‘My God, he’s pumping too much,’” Marotta told WJBK. “I only gave the man $3.”
She didn’t know it, but Bing had slipped Kasyouhanan an extra $20 to fill her tank.
“That interaction there had nothing to do with me in the moment being a police officer,” Bing told WXYZ. “It was just a human thing.”
Marotta and Bing talked while he pumped her gas about how Marotta’s husband had passed away in 2015, and about how times have been tough for her financially since then, according to WJBK.
“I was so surprised, so shocked,” she told the station. “It’s really great.”
After his Facebook post went viral, Kasyouhanan set up a GoFundMe campaign for Marotta, who he says is coming up almost $1,000 short for bills every month.
The GoFundMe campaign went live Tuesday, and it quickly exceeded Kasyouhanan’s $5,000 initial goal. As of Friday afternoon, it had raised more than $15,000 from 469 donors. His Facebook post had been shared nearly 23,000 times.
“Nowadays there’s so much negativity towards police officers,” he wrote in the viral Facebook post. “But we should all respect, appreciate and thank them for what they do.”
This story was originally published September 7, 2018 at 1:13 PM with the headline "75-year-old widow was down to $3 for gas — then a Michigan cop stepped up."