Teen returns dog, refuses reward

I saw this story on the news tonight and it made me tear up. What a wonderful role model! And it's nice to read a good news story once in awhile - we don't hear enough about the good things that people do.

PORTAGE COUNTY -- Matt Heater considers himself to be just a normal 13-year-old boy who loves playing baseball and riding his all-terrain vehicle.

But Jayelen Oaks of Portage County has a different view of the 8th-grader, whom she just met. Oaks thinks that Heater is a hero.

"He's just a good kid," Oaks said. "He's going to grow into such a great man."

After losing everything in a house fire three weeks ago, Oaks said Heater gave the family the one thing they could not replace. He found their missing dog, a Sheltie named Maggie.

"I think I cried for like two weeks," Oaks said. "I hated to see night come because I knew that's when she was alone. Once (he) found her, I thought, now I can move forward."

Oaks and her neighbors blanketed their Suffield Township neighborhood with fliers about the missing dog. Oaks caught a glimpse of Maggie in a nearby farm field and spent an hour calling out her name to no avail.

But last week, while Heater was riding his ATV to his grandmother's house, he spotted a dog darting into a cornfield.

Once he realized it could be the missing dog, Heater returned to the cornfield. He searched for more than 30 minutes before he found Maggie.

When Oaks and her husband were reunited with thier dog, they wanted to reward Heater. The couple wrote him a check for $1,000.

"We told him to put it in his college fund," Oaks said. "We kind of just threw it in the car."

But Heater gave the check back. "I knew right away that I wasn't going to take it because of what they've been through," Heater said. "I didn't really need anything. I was just expecting the smiles that we got."

© 2008 WKYC-TV


ADDENDUM

Here's more good news, closer to home: my friend Mike, in Philadelphia, is interviewed in this article about helping a woman whose grill was stolen off her porch.