A Selfless Act of Kindness

 

by Pa Rock

Man with a Guinea

Yesterday in this space I wrote about three self-absorbed teens in New York State who climbed over a security fence and raided a family of swans who were nesting peacefully on a pond belonging to the citizens of their village.  The swans were protected fowl and community pets.  The heartless young people stole the four baby swans (cygnets) and gave them to friends, and they killed, cooked, and ate Faye, the mother swan.  It was a horrible story about the ugliness of power and privilege.

Today I would like to share a counterpoint to that tale.  It is another story of human interaction was a family of fowl with a far different premise than the first one, yet an ending that is just as sad - only this time it wasn't the fowl who suffered.

The story happened last week, just a couple of days after the teens murdered and ate the swan in New York..  Casey Rivara, a father of two young children, was was driving toward his home in Rocklin, California, twenty-two-miles north of Sacramento last Thursday evening around eight p.m. when he came across a family of ducks trying to cross a busy intersection.   Casey stopped his car and got out, and then proceeded to stop traffic in all four directions so he could help the mother duck and her babies make their way carefully across the intersection.   Several people in the parked cars took photos of him shooing the ducks across the intersection, and the crowd applauded Casey when the task was completed.

With the family of ducks safely across the street, the Good Samaritan turned and was walking back to his own car where his children had been waiting and watching.  But as he was walking back, Casey Rivara was struck by a passing motorist so hard that he was thrown into the air.  He died at the scene.

The driver was a seventeen-year-old girl who did the right thing and remained at the scene following the incident.  Police had said that DUI is not suspected, and no charges have been filed.

Casey Rivara died moments after completing a selfless act of kindness.  May that be the legacy that his children choose to remember and to honor.

Their father was a very good man.