SANTA CLARA — A Santa Clara mail carrier recently received a thank you letter from the U.S. postmaster general in Washington, D.C. thanking him for his “heroic” act of offering his coat to a boy in need this winter.
Brandon Pectol was finishing up his delivery route on Feb. 14 when he looked across the street and saw a boy in his early teens sitting under an awning at the Frei’s Fruit Market on Santa Clara Drive.
Seeing that the boy had no jacket and had been riding his bike in the rain in the cold temperatures, Pectol decided to head over and check on him.
“When I approached him, when he turned around and looked at me, his lips were purple, his hands were purple and I’m like, ‘I can’t leave you like this,’” Pectol said.
Pectol asked the shivering boy if he was OK and if he needed anything. The teen told him that he didn’t have much farther to go and had made a bad choice in not wearing a jacket to school that day. But Pectol didn’t feel right just letting him go, so he gave his Carhartt coat to the boy to wear on his ride home.
Pectol told the boy that he could return the coat to the post office if he had the chance and if not, that’s OK, too
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