On a beautiful Tuesday morning, a customer pulled up to Frank Todaro’s Buffalo, New York, body shop in a silver truck covered in ugly racial slurs.
“I noticed the shop got real quiet, so I turned around and I saw this graffiti with terrible language on it. And I was like, ‘Wow is this really happening?’” recalls Todaro.
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Henry King, the truck’s owner, told WKBW that the graffiti appeared the morning after an altercation with two neighbors, who allegedly told the South Buffalo resident, “We’ll get you kicked off this street. You don’t belong here.”
Police are still investigating the incident.
“I really didn’t ask any questions — how, what, why. I just knew we had to get that off,” Todaro says.
Like a NASCAR pit crew, Todaro’s team jumped in and scrubbed the car clean. The paint was off in 30 minutes.
After finding the right chemical to remove the paint, seven or eight of the shop’s technicians worked on the truck until the graffiti was removed, according to Todaro.
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“It was nice to have that feeling around the shop that everyone came together and cared for someone else,” Todaro said.
When the cleanup was complete, Todaro refused to take King’s money.
“Buffalo is the city of good neighbors. That’s our foundation. We should be known for that,” he said.
Todaro posted about the encounter on Facebook, where his account quickly went viral.
Many commenters praised the shop for quickly and selflessly supporting a neighbor.
