In Indianapolis, 18-year-old Jhaqueil Reagan was on his way to a job interview at a Dairy Queen when a man and his wife spotted him walking and picked him up. The driver, Art Bouvier, had spoken with Jacquiel earlier in the day when the young man asked for directions from Art while he was pouring rock salt around his business after an ice storm.
Jacquiel told them he was walking to the Dairy Queen because he just didn’t have any money for bus fare. That walk would have been 10 miles if Art and his wife had not picked him up about 5 miles into it. Art realized that Jacquiel was going to walk 10 miles to a job that would pay him minimum wage… $7.25 an hour.
Then, before getting to that Dairy Queen, Art told Jacquiel that he would double that pay if he came to work for him at his business, Papa Roux’s, a restaurant. Jacquiel accepted the kind offer.
When Art posted about it on Facebook, it received 15,000 likes and was shared nearly 4,000 times. The other part of Jacquiel’s story is that his mother died two years ago, and he was walking to the Dairy Queen hoping to get a job, so he could support his younger brothers and sisters, something he had to drop out of high school to do.
When officials at the city’s transportation system found out about Jacquel’s story, they gave him a year’s worth of bus passes to get him back and forth to his job.
