Do you know the phrase “No good deed goes unpunished”? The implication is that even when you do the right thing, someone’s going to find fault with it. Dillion Reagan learned that the hard way when he worked for the home improvement giant Home Depot in Portland, Oregon. After four years of devoted service to the company, Dillion was fired for committing a sheer act of heroism when he stopped a kidnapper in his tracks. Here’s what happened. In 2017, Dillion was finishing up an otherwise uneventful shift in his role as an associate in the tool rental department of the store. Then things got crazy.
Dillion suddenly heard screaming coming from the store’s parking lot, and the loudest screams were actually from one of Dillion’s coworkers who was responding to what seemed to be a domestic disturbance. There was a young child involved, so Dillion did what most of us would like to think we would do in this situation. He sprung into action immediately, particularly when he heard the child’s mother shout, “Somebody help me, please! He’s stealing my kid, he’s kidnapping my child!” Immediately, Dillion and his colleague called the police and the dispatcher asked Dillion to track the man on foot discreetly.
Because he was asked to do so, Dillion left his workplace and followed the would-be kidnapper. The route he followed was winding and took several different turns, and the police arrived 10 minutes later. The officers said that they would have been unable to locate the kidnapper, who was hiding in a hidden corridor, had Dillion not been on his trail. However, there was a twist: Dillion committed a safety infraction when he left his workplace unattended. When he returned to the Home Depot, Dillion’s angry manager was waiting for him and immediately began to berate him for violating the company’s policies. Then, the manager did something remarkable. He fired Dillion.
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What the manager and Home Depot didn’t anticipate was the media firestorm that took place after they fired Dillion. The managers of the store quickly tried to do damage control and even contacted Dillion to admit that they made a mistake. They even offered his job back to him and acted as if nothing had happened. Dillion politely refused their offer. The man said that his conscience would not allow him to work for a company that demands that workers endanger children for the sake of bureaucratic code adherence. Watch the news story about Dillion below.
