As crime stories go, this one’s pretty mild. No weapons, no injuries, no sirens or blue lights.
Still, imagine your kid calling a month into his college career to say he’d just been robbed.
“I was a little concerned about him going to the big city,” Ned Rinalducci said after getting the phone call from his son, Georgia State University freshman Mason Rinalducci. “He’s a fairly resilient kid but he was certainly rattled.”
The family lives in Wilmington Island, near Savannah. Mason considered Georgia Southern University, where his dad is a sociology professor, but chose Georgia State for its film program.
“Georgia State’s just leagues ahead and film in Atlanta is just crazy,” Mason said.
Speaking of crazy, here’s what happened not long after classes started. He was waiting for a friend near Centennial Olympic Park when four guys came walking up.
“They were like, ‘We have coke. You want to buy some?’” Mason recalled, adding, “It’s not all that unusual for someone to come up and offer you weed, but cocaine?”
He declined. One of the guys then grabbed Mason’s electric skateboard and zoomed away while his pals took off in the opposite direction.
“I followed them for a second,” Mason said, but he figured it was hopeless. He reported the theft to the Atlanta Police Department but figured that was hopeless, too.
“If it were to show up again that’d be awesome,” Mason said. It didn’t.
The board was no ordinary ride, by the way. It can go more than 20 miles per hour and cost about $1,000 - all the money he'd saved from high school graduation gifts. The brand name, curiously enough, is Boosted.
“I went from being baffled and shocked to pretty pissed and then pretty sad,” Mason said, adding that it was his method of commuting to and around campus.
“I haven’t figured out the bus schedules yet,” he said. “I just always assume I’m on the wrong one.”
His dad, who went to high school in Atlanta, wrote about the unfortunate incident on his Facebook page. The response was overwhelming, with longtime friends not only offering support but urging him to start a GoFundMe to help Mason buy some new wheels. Absolutely not, he said at first.
“My wife said, ‘You don’t do that for a skateboard. You do that when someone has cancer,’” he said. The drumbeat from eager donors was unrelenting, though, and they finally they gave in. The campaign, titled “Restoring Mason’s faith in humanity,” launched under the conditions that Mason write thank-you notes to his benefactors and that it would end as soon as it hit the amount needed to replace the board.
It didn’t take long.
“In three days there’s the $1,000 that this overpriced skateboard cost,” Ned Rinalducci said. “I told him he is the modern-day George Bailey at the end of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and he actually got the reference. So many of our friends proved to be his guardian angels.”
As school was letting out for Thanksgiving Mason has been zipping around on his replacement ride - always with a buddy now - and remains abashed at the outpouring.
“It was pretty humbling. I feel like I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “I want everybody to know just how much it means. It’s not about a board. It’s the people.”
Many of the donations came with a note of encouragement.
“Life is a lesson,” one said.
Here’s what Mason has learned.
“Even in the big city, there’s more good and generosity than you even realize,” he said. “Even if it all seems dark, there’s a light in people.”
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