Darren Ballard Sr. of Tacoma, Washington, was sitting in traffic next to a police car when he noticed something out of the ordinary. An on-duty sheriff’s deputy caught Ballard’s eye, and he snapped a picture. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much of anything. It appears to be just a photo of a sheriff’s cruiser sitting on the side of the road. But, a closer look reveals the cop is also captured in the image, sitting in a patch of grass, all but hidden by a tree.
Although it’s difficult to make out, the officer is next to someone, and there’s a lot more going on in the picture than initially meets the eye. Ballard had captured a genuine act of kindness from a concerned officer. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said. “I look over and there’s an officer in uniform, sitting on the grass, sitting with a homeless guy sharing a sandwich and I was just blown away.”
Just saw this cop having a sandwich with a homeless guy … wanting no attention just doing a good deed,” the Pierce County man wrote as he posted the image to Facebook. “There are good police officers out there … this made my day, please share!” And, share they did. It didn’t take long for the photo to spread like wildfire with thousands of shares from social media users, including one from the local sheriff’s department where the deputy works.
As it went viral, more information emerged about the cop and his unlikely friend. The deputy, who wished to remain “anonymous,” found the homeless man panhandling and struck up a conversation with him, according to Pierce County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Ed Troyer, explaining the story behind the viral photo. “Our deputy asked him if he was hungry the man said he was. So the deputy sat down with him and shared his lunch with the man,” Troyer wrote on the department’s Facebook page, according to CBS News.
