METAIRIE, La. — Here’s a Christmas tale about a lost wallet, Good Samaritan, and the power of social media.
It started out as a family outing to see the Christmas lights at Lafreniere Park.
“We had a lot of fun,” Chris Capretto said.
Capretto and his wife returned to their Metairie home and were getting their two boys ready for bed.
The doorbell rang, Capretto answered the door and a woman was standing there with his wallet.
“She’s holding (the wallet) out and she said I think you might have dropped this,” Capretto said. “This looks like it’s yours and I didn’t know it was missing. So, I was really taken aback.”
Capretto says he must have lost the wallet in Lafreniere’s large parking lot near the food vendors.
“It fell out of my pocket when I was getting out of the car, and it must have been lying in the parking lot.”
He admits the wallet was full of cash.
“I immediately checked inside; I was like all the cash is still there. It was amazing. Before I could even really thank her, she had turned and walked away.”
Capretto decided to post a shot of the Good Samarita from his ring doorbell camera on social media, hoping someone could help locate her.
“Not only is this a good Christmas story of really an Angel that came and helped me, but also I was like, I felt I didn’t give her the gratitude she deserved,” he said.
Sure enough, a few hours later someone recognized Cerris Thomassie Kent and tagged her in the post.
She told us her father actually spotted the wallet.
Kent looked at the ID and when they realized Capretto lived close by, she decided to bring him the wallet.
“I told him I had his wallet, you could tell he did not realize, so I’m definitely glad that I found it, and I was able to get it back to him and someone random didn’t just take it and steal it,” Kent said.
Kent says years ago, someone stole the money out of a purse she accidentally left at a restaurant while on vacation.
“The people left my purse and my wallet and took all of my vacation money, so I know how that feels and I would never want to put someone else in that position.”
Capretto couldn’t be more grateful.
“The whole experience just really showed me that there’s still good people out there,” he said. “It was very heartwarming.”
Capretto has already used this experience as a teachable moment for his kids to not only keep better track of their wallet, but it’s always best to do the right thing, not just during Christmastime.
“This is how you should act,” Capretto said. “If you find something like that, you track down the right person and give it to them.”
“I figured I would just bring it back instead of having him worry about it if he realized it was gone,” Kent said.
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