Jake Jackson was celebrating a friend’s birthday at Casa Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant in Kyle, Texas when a stranger approached him.
“I’ve seen your story and need to help out somehow,” she said. “So, I’ve paid for your entire table.”
There were 10 of them. The bill was north of $300.
“I can’t thank people enough,” said Jackson, a junior at Hays High School in Buda.
But, why? What would propel someone Jackson had never met to do something so generous?
Let’s rewind the tape back to July 2018, the summer of Jackson’s freshman year, when he and some friends were swimming at Texas State in San Marcos.
“There’s this cliff that me and my friends found that we would always jump off of,” he said. “I was feeling like a daredevil that day, so I got in with the water that was flowing down in the waterfall and I ran with it and jumped out. I slipped and fell into the waterfall, so it pushed me down into this air bubble. I was almost drowning at that point. Then I got sucked back into the waterfall and it pushed me down to these rocks and I hit my shin. I cut it clean open.”
Jackson admits now that he needed stitches. But at the time? Yeah, he was going back in the water.
“I’m a kid,” he said.
Jackson didn’t think much of the injury. At worst it was just a calcium deposit or scar tissue from the waterfall incident. So he played – and starred – as a sophomore on Hays’ junior varsity team, scoring 15 touchdowns.
By season’s end, though, the bump grew to be the size of a baseball.
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