Joey Resto wished he could have done more for the bare- chested homeless man he encountered on an A train last Friday night.
But a selfless act of giving a shivering man the shirt off his back and the hat off his head earned him praise from thousands of people who commented on a video of the encounter caught on video by another passenger and posted to Facebook.
“It was a natural reaction to help, to do what I can,” Resto told the Daily News on Monday. “I hope they find this guy. It’s not hard to spot him out.”
Resto, 23, who works as a paralegal, boarded a Brooklyn-bound A train in Washington Heights around 10 p.m. on Friday to see his fellow passengers avoid a shirtless, smelly man sitting alone.
But Resto, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, sat right across from him.
Resto recalled that the homeless man - who remains unidentified - looked like he had been roughed up recently. Resto said there were bumps on his head and abrasions on his skin. Not to mention that temperatures had plunged to the high 30s that night.
He took video of the man for his Snapchat.
“After I did the first video of him with nothing on, I said, ‘Nah I can’t just sit here and not do anything,’” Resto said.
That’s when the subway Samaritan pulled off his white cotton t-shirt and offered it to the man, who was wearing only a pair of blue jeans and gray sneakers.
“He didn’t really say yea, he just kind of lifted his arms like a child,” Resto said.
Resto helped the man into the shirt, leaving Resto in his tank top. The man explained that he had been robbed of his clothes and cash earlier, according to Resto.
Resto tried to get the man to come with him to Brooklyn for a hot meal, coffee or more clothes, but he ultimately stayed on the train as Resto got off at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Sts. station.
“He was warm for the first time in I don’t know how long,” he said. “He just curled up in a corner and went to sleep.”
The video was later posted - and has been viewed more than 13 million times and garnered more than 300,000 likes as of Monday.
“The guy did a good deed, so I wanted to record it,” Lazaro Nolasco, who took the video, told the Daily News. “I would tell him, ‘God bless him.’ That was thoughtful.”
Fuente: www.nydailynews.com
