When Everett Miller was about 15, he was living with friends and relatives, sleeping on couches. The only real stability in his life was his grandmother.
"She would come pick me up wherever I was living, on three-day weekends or breaks from school," Miller said. "And she was the person that I admired the most."
One day, his grandmother took him to the mall. As she waited for him on a bench, Miller went into the store Spencer's to look for a band T-shirt. He had developed a habit of shoplifting, and when he found the Rage Against the Machine shirt he wanted, he decided to steal it.
"So I crouched down behind a clothing rack, and I started to roll up that T-shirt. And I was getting ready to stuff it in my pants," he said.
"As I was doing that, a teenage girl, probably just a couple of years older than me, crouched down beside me and whispered to me, 'Don't do it, man. It's not worth it.'"
She said it so only he could hear.
"The tone of her voice wasn't angry. It wasn't judgmental. It was caring," Miller recalled. "Then she looked at me and she kept her eyes on me until I unrolled the T-shirt and folded it back up."
Miller stood up, took the folded shirt to the register and paid for it. He rushed out of the store to meet his grandmother, still waiting on the bench.
Thirty years later, Miller says he thinks of that stranger nearly every day.
"I don't know who that teenage girl was. I don't know why she cared so much. All I know is that whoever she was, the fact that she whispered that to me secretly kept me from making a terrible mistake."
Sometimes he replays that moment in his mind, imagining what would have happened if she hadn't intervened.
"I almost certainly would've gotten caught. And the police would've gone and found my granny. And I would've disappointed her and broken her trust," he said. "And I would've had to live with what I had done to her for the rest of my life."
A few words from a stranger, he says, helped him protect the
one relationship that mattered most.
"I'm so thankful to her. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you to my unsung hero."
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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