Big-Hearted Glendale, Arizona Cop Buys Food For Struggling Single Mom With His Own Money
A Glendale, Arizona, police officer is being hailed as a hero after using his own money to buy groceries for a struggling single mom, KTVK (Phoenix) is reporting.
Glendale Police Sergeant Jeff Turney was working his patrol when he saw a woman and her children sitting by the side of the road at a busy intersection in suburban Phoenix, along with a few boxes of toys.
“I saw [the woman] with her children, with toys spread out on the ground. I told her she couldn’t have her children out there. It was too dangerous to have her children out there along the edge of the road.”
The woman, identified as April Casey, is a single mom with two children, 14-month-old Ethan and 4-year-old Skyler. She told the Glendale cop that she’d been struggling to make ends meet and did the only thing she could think of to do to come up with some money: she boxed up her kids’ toys to sell them.
“I don’t have anything and I’ve got to come up with money for rent and bills and diapers. I’ve been in a really tough situation lately and no one has really helped us.”
The struggling single mom had been working at a pizza place, but when she had a seizure at work, her doctors told her she couldn’t go back until she got her medical problems under control.
Sergeant Turney could have written April a ticket or even taken her to jail (for having small children out in the open at such a dangerous and busy intersection). Instead, however, the big-hearted cop did something else: he took the struggling single mom to the grocery store and, with his own money, helped her buy food and baby supplies.
“I told him I needed diapers,” Casey remembers, “He said, ‘Why don’t we go down to the store and I’ll get you guys what you need.'”
Turney says the single mom only bought stuff for the kids and was reluctant to buy anything — even food — for herself.
“She didn’t buy anything buy things for the kids,” Turney noticed. “I practically had to force her to back to the grocery section to get food for herself.”
As April describes it, she was only concerned about her kids and nothing else.
“I wasn’t even worried about myself at the time. I was just worrying about my kids, that they had what they needed. That’s what I was doing out there in the first place,” said Casey. “What Sergeant Turney did for us was amazing and I will be forever grateful.”
At a time when stories of police overstepping their bounds, or worse, tend to hit the news on an almost daily basis, it’s encouraging to hear stories of good cops doing good deeds. And Glendale’s Sergeant Turney is not the first cop to use his own money to help out a person who needs it.
In June 2015, according to this Inquisitr report, Officer Zach Ropos of the Lake County (Ohio) Sheriff’s Office was on duty when he noticed the little girl’s lemonade stand, and he struck up a conversation with her. When he found out that the girl was saving up for an iPad, Ropos said he’d give her an old one he had lying around at home that he didn’t use any more. But when he saw that it didn’t work, he bought her a brand new one (a bare-bones iPad will set you back around $399).
For Sergeant Turney, he just wants to remind everyone that he’s not the only good-hearted cop out there.
“I’m not unique,” Turney said. “I’m just one of many officers out here on the streets of Glendale who do this every day.”
[Image via www.billionphotos.com/Shutterstock]
