We can’t all choose our family. Many people have had to face consequences of financial decisions that their parents have made, decisions that limit their choices as to what sort of schools they can attend or even access to medical care.
Even worse are decisions family make that are criminal. These can heavily impact a family, or lead others down wrong paths.
Many people have been brave enough to make better choices than their parents or family. They’ve chosen to do the right thing. But in this video from CBS’s On the Road, one amazing teen makes a conscious choice to not only reject the mistakes his father has made but to also fix the mistakes of his father!
Tona Herndon, a widow in her 70s who uses a cane, had been visiting the grave of her deceased husband who had died just two weeks earlier. When returning to her car and getting in, before she even realized what was happening, she was mugged. The mugger snagged her purse and the $700 in it.
The mugger was caught soon after. However the story spread across news broadcasts quickly. What kind of mugger, after all, would wait for a recently widowed elderly lady to come out of a cemetery to mug her?
For one teenager the picture of the mugger spread across so many TVs was one that he instantly recognized. Fifteen year old Christian Lunsford saw that it was his father. And just weeks before seeing his father’s mugshot on TV he’d gotten $200 from him so that Christian could make a band trip.
The teenager knew right away what he needed to do: give the money back to the person it most likely had come from. “You feel really low,” Christian says in this video. “Is that going to be me? Am I going to end up like that?”
So Christian reached out to Tona Herndon to arrange a meeting. In the video, Tona isn’t sure what is going to happen as Christian and she meet in front of cameras for, presumably, the very first time. The widower is now face to face with the son of the man who mugged at what On the Road correctly states was her most vulnerable hour. But as Christian hands her the money his father gave her the video becomes a heart warming moment where we realize that our parents don’t have to define us. And we do not have to repeat their mistakes, financial or otherwise.