Eighty-seven-year-old Pat Goins didn’t know Deshawn Pressley before fate brought them together on a recent Saturday afternoon. Now, she considers him a close friend.
It all started when both Pat and Deshawn were shopping for groceries at the Kroger in Lemon Township, Ohio. Pat was walking down an aisle when, suddenly, a man rushed up to her and snatched her purse right out of her shopping cart. Shocked, Pat began to holler for help.
When Deshawn heard her calls for help, he didn’t hesitate to abandon his cart and rush to her aid. “Hearing her voice screaming and her being scared, I just knew I had to do something,” Deshawn recalled.
The store’s surveillance camera was rolling as Deshawn dashed out of the store and ran after the mugger. The younger man quickly caught the thief and began to struggle to pin him onto the ground. About a dozen other shoppers followed the commotion out of the store. One man grabbed Pat’s purse and returned it to her as Deshawn held the robber down until police arrived.
“I chased him down,” Pressley explained. “He got to his car and everything, but I grabbed him, held him to the floor, got him down. Did what I had to do until the police arrived.”
As Deshawn restrained the man, later identified as Derek Vaughn, the angry crowd insisted that he apologize to Pat for stealing her purse.
“They [the crowd] told him he better apologize to me,” said Pat. “He said he was sorry, he said he was sorry.”
Pat says once she got over the shock of being mugged, she got mad.
“I think I was a little bit hurt to think that somebody would do that, and, I told him, I pointed at him and said ‘you know, if you needed something, all you had to do was ask,'” she said.
Some time later, Pat got to meet up with her hero again when Butler County Sheriff’s Office presented him with the Citizen’s Award.
“You’re the man,” Sheriff Richard Jones told Deshawn. “I’m very proud of you.”
Pat and Deshawn have plans to meet up again in the future, and Pat can’t wait to meet his 1-year-old daughter. She’s so grateful that a total stranger didn’t hesitate to help her when she needed him!
Share this story to thank Deshawn for rushing to help this sweet lady!
