5-Year-Old Selling Lemonade for Fallen Soldiers Gets Surprise from Police
For his last lemonade stand, 5-year-old Grady Valen wanted to raise money for some new Legos. His mom Tricia wasn’t surprised, but she was proud he would learn to earn his own money.
This past weekend, however, Grady decided he wanted to have another lemonade stand for a very different reason.
Hoping to be a police officer when he grows up, Grady asked his mom if he could use his stand to raise money for fallen officers.
This time, Tricia was shocked, and listened as her son explained why he wanted to do it in the first place.
“He wanted to do it because he wanted to support police officers,” she said.
Of course, Tricia couldn’t have been more proud of how selfless Grady was at such a young age.
“As a mom, that’s what you want to hear from your child,” she said.
“You want to know that they have empathy, that they’re thinking of others … it gets me a little teared up when I talk about it because I’m so proud that he has that in him.”
Grady managed to raise over $400 that afternoon, and his generosity wasn’t about to go unnoticed.
Local police officers decided to treat the 5-year-old to an exclusive tour at a Nevada police station.
Officers at Henderson’s Police substation brought Grady to meet one of the department’s drug dogs and took him into a real SWAT vehicle.
He even got the chance to flip on the sirens on a car, to which he responded by quickly plugging his ears and shouting over them, “It’s loud!”
Grady wasn’t shy to tell the officers that he wanted to be just like them when he grew up. And they agreed he’d be a wonderful officer someday.
“Somebody that has that kind of a heart already at five is just going to make an awesome officer,” Officer Scott Williams said.
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