A surveillance camera captured four New Jersey teens in an act of honesty. It shows them paying for headphones and batteries even though the store was closed.
The owners of Buddy’s Small Lots in Wayne, N.J., said they got a call that the store had been broken into about 7 p.m. Sunday night. They later learned a malfunctioning lock left the door to the closed shop open to anyone who wanted to walk in.But they were shocked by what they saw in surveillance footage of the supposed break-in.
Four teens were seen walking around the store looking for a clerk and waving at the cameras. Then they did a little shopping, leaving cash on the counter for everything they took, sales tax included.
“I think it’s terrific that there are still people out there with moral character not to do the wrong thing when they easily could,” said Marci Lederman with the store.
The store’s owners were so surprised by the teens that they started looking for them. They found the four William Patterson High School football players Tuesday.
The teens said they didn’t think they did anything special, and that they left cash on the counter because they had to get back to practice. Kelle Gallimore, who was seen on the cameras waving a dollar bill around before laying it on the store’s counter, said he was surprised by the attention.
Here’s the report from NBC’s Channel 4 in New York — a report on a kind of news event that is all too rare but will hopefully get attention from the news media because it confirms that, yes, there are honest and good people in the world
The video won’t embed so go to the link above to watch the report — which shows you the surveillance tape and the youths after they were tracked down by NBC’s Channel 4 in NYC.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.