Canadian paying it forward to honour stranger who paid her grocery bill

A Canadian woman is honouring a man she only met once because he died a day after paying for her groceries in a California grocery store.

Jamie-Lynne Knighten said she was struggling with her five-month-old son at a grocery store north of San Diego when she tried to use her credit card. But it kept getting declined — there was a hold on it.

It was her Canadian credit card — she had just returned from visiting her family in Barrie, Ont. — and the only one the 28-year-old mother had on her as she forgot her other credit and debit cards at home.

That’s when 29-year-old Matthew Jackson stepped up and offered to pay.

“May I take care of your groceries?” he asked.

She politely refused, but he insisted on paying the $200 bill on Nov. 10. So she relented after he made her promise to do the same thing for someone else another time. Knighten agreed.

“It felt like a huge bear hug,” she said.

She only knew the man’s first name at the time and where he worked — at the gym where she works out — and reached out a week later to thank him.

That’s when she found out Jackson had died in a car crash about 24 hours after the two met. After several weeks of trying to track down his family to tell them about Jackson’s kindness without success, she took to Facebook.

“His death shouldn’t go unnoticed,” she said.

She wrote a heartfelt post on Facebook explaining the stranger’s good deed and started a group, called Matthew’s Legacy, as a place to talk about random acts of kindness. The story exploded.

Hundreds posted messages of their “pay-it-forward” moments in honour of Jackson’s thoughtfulness.

“We want to use it as a vessel for people giving and receiving random acts of kindness and inspire others to do the same,” she said.

On Tuesday, Knighten said, she met with one of Jackson’s friends who was with him in the car when it crashed into a tree.

He told her Jackson was in the middle ofyet another act of kindness — taking his friend to the Walmart so he could buy transmission fluid to put into his friend’s broken-down car.

Knighten said she wants to honour Jackson, but is trying to figure out how to harness all the kindness that is pouring out on the page.

“Maybe this can be a way to connect people who want to help with people who need help,” she said.

Knighten has since struck up a friendship with Jackson’s mother and the hope is to preserve Jackson’s legacy of kindness.

“I think deep down Matthew had some Canadian in him, being so kind and all,” Knighten said.