Generally, if a man starts taking off his pants outside a McDonald’s at night, you probably don’t want to stick around.
But when 26-year-old Daniel Richards in Fresno, California, stripped down, it was an act of kindness.
It started when he and his wife decided to make a donut run on a cold night. As they approached the donut shop, a homeless man approached them.
He made the usual request, asking for change and then, when they said they had none, for food. Daniel chatted with the man (whose name was David) a bit, and then before he and his wife left, he decided to make the man an unusual offer.
It was 40 degrees out, based on what the wife said during the video (which went viral on TikTok and has since been picked up and shared).
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The homeless man said he’d recently lost all his belongings, and all he had was what he was wearing. Daniel was wearing a pair of sweatpants, which he kindly offered to the homeless man.
“My husband is getting out of the car right now and he’s going to give this guy his pants,” the wife, whose name was not shared, can be heard saying in the video.
“We noticed he didn’t have any pants on just very short running shorts and he seemed to be very cold,” she added later, according to the Daily Mail.
“After getting into our vehicle my husband began to tell me there’s no way he could drive off knowing that man would possibly go to sleep that night on the sidewalk or behind a building without any pants or blanket of the sort … That’s when I decided to pull out my phone and record.”
The couple feared that if they made a run to a store to purchase some clothes for the man, he’d be gone by the time they got back. Time was of the essence, so Daniel got creative.
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Before just stripping down and potentially causing a scene, Daniel made sure the man would be comfortable accepting the pair of pants he was currently wearing.
“Before my wife filmed this I had initially went up to him to see if he would accept them, instead of running up to him with my pants off as I didn’t want to freak him out,” he explained.
Daniel has a habit of doing things like this, the couple said, they just don’t always record it.
They wanted to reassure people that their goal was not to get famous, exploit the homeless man or highlight how kind they are — the wife simply thought the world could use a video of a little kindness.
“I had no clue that my wife was recording until she showed it to me in the car and she was the one who convinced me to upload the video in the first place,” Daniel explained.
And, thanks to the video and Daniel’s willingness to help a stranger, we now know that we can give even more than the shirts off our backs.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.