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Photo of Waiter Feeding Man With No Hands Lights Up the Internet

Published  April 25, 2016 7:40pm EDT
News
FOX 29 Philadelphia

(INSIDE EDITION) This good deed went viral.

Waiter Alex Ruiz became an instant everyday hero after a photo of him feeding a man with no hands went viral on the internet.

This good deed went viral.

The man walked into the Cinco De Mayo Mexican Grill in Douglasville, Georgia, on Sunday. He had no hands and no prosthetics and asked if someone could help him eat a meal.

So Ruiz, 22, sat him at a table in his section and proceeded to take his order, and then hand fed the man.

"I said I would help ... and from the bottom of my heart I really wanted to help him," the Spanish-speaking Ruiz told InsideEdition.com through an interpreter.

Asked what he thought of all the attention he's getting, Ruiz replied, "I didn't mean for it to cause a lot of attention ... I just wanted to help."

Ruiz said he didn't ask how the man had lost his hands. "I didn't want the man to feel uncomfortable," Ruiz said.

"We had never seen him before," waitress Crystal Figueroa said of the customer. "Alex was just sitting there with him. It was just a very nice thing to see," she told InsideEdtion.com.

Reginald Widener was sitting at the bar when he turned around and saw the man, who had bandages around his wrists, being fed by Ruiz.

"I'm not the most positive person in the world," Widener told IE. "But that just made me feel good inside."

He snapped a photo and posted it to his Facebook page, where it has been shared more than 800 times.

The diner had ordered shrimp tacos and Ruiz rolled them up and fed them to him. He sat in a booth with the man for 30 minutes, talking to him as he scooped rice and beans onto a fork.

After the meal was finished, Ruiz took the man's money to the cashier and brought back his change.

Then Ruiz went back to waiting tables. "He just went about his day as if nothing happened," Figueroa, 24, said. "Everyone at work was telling him what a great guy he was. That's just something you don't see. A person feeding a stranger."

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