“Let’s Put Them On And Take Care Of You”: The NYPD Officer Who Bought A Stranger New Boots
It was a freezing November night in Times Square, temperatures hovering just above freezing, when NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo noticed something most passersby had already learned to walk past: an elderly man sitting barefoot on the sidewalk, his feet exposed to the cold pavement.
DePrimo, just 25 years old at the time, walked over and asked the obvious question. “Where are your shoes?” The man’s answer was almost heartbreakingly polite. “It’s okay, officer… I’ve never had a pair of shoes. But God bless you and thank you for doing what you’re doing.” Most people, in that moment, might have offered a few dollars and moved on. DePrimo did something else entirely — he walked to the nearby Skechers store, and using his own money, bought a $100 pair of all-weather insulated boots and thick thermal socks. Then he came back, knelt down on the pavement in front of the man, and put them on his feet himself.
He didn’t know anyone was watching. A tourist from Arizona named Jennifer Foster happened to be nearby with her husband, about to approach the man herself to offer some change, when she saw DePrimo get there first. She quietly captured the moment on her phone instead. “The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man,” she later wrote in a letter to the NYPD. “The officer expected NOTHING in return and did not know I was watching.”
DePrimo walked away afterward without telling anyone what he’d done — except his mother. “I told my mother and that was it,” he said. “She cried about it and she was very happy.” He didn’t think much more of it. He simply went back to his post at 44th Street and Broadway and continued his shift, the $100 receipt tucked into his bulletproof vest, where he kept it as a quiet reminder.
He had no idea the photo Foster took would end up on the NYPD’s Facebook page — or that it would explode from there, gathering hundreds of thousands of likes, tens of thousands of comments, and shares from people around the world, all within days. DePrimo went from an anonymous beat cop to a symbol, appearing on the TODAY show, fielding interviews from outlets across the country, all for something he never expected anyone to see.
What made the moment resonate wasn’t just the boots themselves — it was everything DePrimo said afterward about why he did it. “You see something like this and you remember that people have it worse,” he said. “There’s thousands of people still out there without power, without homes, and it’s upsetting… I think it’s important to have a reminder like that.” He hadn’t been chasing recognition. He’d simply seen someone cold, and decided that was reason enough to act — no camera required, no audience expected. Sometimes the most powerful kindness is the kind that was never meant to be seen at all.
