BEVERLY, Mass. — We’ve seen a lot of police officers make the news, especially in the last year; and they weren’t always good stories, but this one is. Patrolman Josh Spitaleri’s job requires quick thinking, and that’s exactly what he did when Facebook assigned him the case of the missing dolls.
“I felt really bad because I lost my dolls,” said 5-year-old Hannah Dullea.
She may not be an actual mother, but don’t tell that to her dolls, and on this Mother’s Day this mom got the exact opposite of a gift. She set the dolls down for a few minutes in a bin on her front porch while she played with her brother and then, “Somebody came up and took them,” said her brother Danny.
After a few hours of searching around, her dad Scott Dullea decided to post on Facebook.
“No questions asked just drop them back off, that would make my daughter happy,” Scott said. “We didn’t get any response about returning those particular dolls but the response from Beverly from the community was amazing. I mean there were probably 15 or 20 comments like ‘We’ll bring you by some dolls’ or ‘We’ve got some extra barbies.’ We could obviously replace them, but she really loves those dolls.”
While the community was still writing responses, Patrolman Spitaleri took action.
“I decided to go to Walgreens and buy four Barbie dolls,” Spitaleri said. “I left her a note and I knocked on the door and I drove away.”
“He left this really nice note that said, ‘I hope this makes you feel better, sorry you lost your dolls,’ which was just, you know, it was amazing,” Scott said.
Now, because of our interview, the secret good deed is no longer a secret.
“The current state of policing, nobody wants to see what’s going on across the country, but, you know, we’re always here to help everybody, and I think that that’s the message that we want to get across, especially in the City of Beverly on a day-to-day basis,” Spitaleri said. “We want to make sure that we can help people and then we can make people smile and we can write the wrong if we can.”
And for Hannah, it was the perfect Mother’s Day gift.
“I feel very happy,” she said.
“I just hope the old ones went to somebody that they needed more,” Scott said.
The family thinks the person who took them thought they were free since they were in a bin on her front porch. Patrolman Spitaleri hasn’t able to solve the case of the missing dolls yet, but he was able to solve the case of an upset little girl.
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