A Galveston, Indiana, police officer was saying thank you this week to a 4-year-old hospital patient for giving him a gift he won't soon forget.
Earlier this week, Galveston Town Marshal Shawn Durham was working security at a hospital in Kokomo when the girl walked in with her mother.
"I asked them to take a seat and once the registration clerk was ready for them they would call her upm" Durham wrote on his Facebook page. "Within moments of that the mother carried the little girl back up to the counter and the young lady asked me if I was a police officer and I answered with a big smile, "Well, yes I am,' and she said thank you and handed me a red envelope. I opened the envelope up and inside the envelope was this letter and it states: 'I may be young, but I'm old enough to know you risk yourself for others so you are a hero. I'm giving you this penny. It's a good luck charm. It has super powers that will keep you from harm. Thank you. Eliot. Eliot Fuller.' And inside the letter were two pennies. The lucky charm that she has inside the envelope."
Durham said the letter instantly choked him up.
"Put a little bit of a tear in my eye," he said. "You always hear the negative. You don't always hear the positive sometimes, so for this young lady to life someone else's spirits at that time and to provide something like that, it just reminds you why you became a police officer – and that is to hopefully at some point make a change in somebody's life or help somebody that you may or may not realize you've helped."
Durham said he plans to keep that lucky penny in his left uniform pocket for the rest of his career.
