Good deed leaves DI teen and his family feeling especially thankful

If Daniel Island teen Devin Casper ever had any doubts about the goodness of humanity, they quickly evaporated after a recent act of kindness.

Devin, a ninth grade student at Philip Simmons High School, lost his wallet a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. Normally, it might not be such a worrisome situation, as the teen didn’t typically carry a lot of money in his billfold. But on Election Day, the day it went missing, Devin and his brother, Dylan, had just earned $100 working on a computer for a friend.

“They spent a month and a half, two months, doing all of the work,” said his mom, Sheela. “On Election Day, they delivered the computer to his friend and his mom paid them in cash. They were so excited! Just thrilled.”

Devin popped the cash into his wallet and the family headed to Daniel Island School, where his parents got in line to cast their ballots at the polls. Devin and Dylan rode bikes and scooters around the campus. The voting lines were long and the day was especially “hectic,” noted Sheela. The family left a couple of hours later to head home. Devin didn’t realize it at the time, but his wallet had fallen out of his pocket on Daniel Island Drive. It would be almost a week before he went looking for it.

“In all honesty, I didn’t even know that I had lost it,” he said. “I thought I had set it down somewhere in the house.”

When it didn’t turn up at home, panic began to set in.

“He was just devastated,” added Sheela. “White as a ghost. He said ‘I don’t know where it is and I have looked everywhere.’ We spent that day tearing up the house, the car. He couldn’t remember if he took it out of the car, out of his pocket. We checked the garage, his room.”

They even took a flashlight and went down to the Daniel Island School to look around the campus. Then Devin got an idea.

“It was his idea to post it on the Daniel Island Moms Facebook page,” added Sheela, who quickly typed out a message to the page’s 3500 followers.

“Hi Moms,” she wrote. “My son has lost his wallet, and it contained his first ‘real’ earnings. Have any of you by any chance seen it around? I know it is probably not likely, but wanted to try.”

Luckily, Dylan had the same “Carolina Panthers” wallet as Devin, so Sheela was able to include a photo with the post. Within two days, she got a call from Cindy Holmes at Daniel Island School, who told her that someone found a wallet matching the image in the photo on the way in to school and had turned it in. When Sheela picked it up, she discovered that all the cash was still inside. Devin was blown away.