When Homeless Pal Dies, Woman Pays to Bury Him

His name was Smokey, and Juanita Vega woke him up every day for 11 years. In return, he called her "sis" and gave her tchotchkes that he found—a sweet friendship between a homeless man and an employee at the New York City bank where he slept in the vestibule. So when Smokey, aka Richard Coleman, died in April at age 62, Vega stepped in to stop him from being buried in New York City's Potter's Field, reports DNAinfo. "I didn’t want him to end up there," says Vega of the public cemetery. "He was a nice person. He didn’t deserve that." Her solution: She coughed up $2,000 to give him a proper burial last week in New Jersey.

It doesn't hurt that Vega's boyfriend is a funeral director who donated his services, and a few people in Vega's Upper East Side neighborhood slipped her a little cash, but most of the cost was hers. "I just wanted to do the right thing," she says. "Everybody knew him, so why should he end up in Potter's Field?" (More uplifting news stories.)