After receiving several warnings, a Chicago teen had a run in with police when he was found trespassing at a local gym. Vincent Gonzales was found repeatedly sneaking into the basketball court of the fitness facility to play hoops with a friend.

An employee of X-Sport Fitness made good on a promise when they found the teen boy, suspected to be about 15-years-old, on the court yet again.

"We had no choice but to contact police," said X-Sport Operations Manager Justin Pritchett.

Pritchett said the teen would repeatedly walk past the front desk and onto the court. One day, he even hid in a bathroom stall to try and hide from the fitness center employees.

"He had had a membership, but his mother could not afford to pay for it anymore and it expired," Pritchett said. "All he wanted to do was play basketball."

When Officer Mario Valenti responded to the call from the gym, what happened next surprised everyone.

"After 23 years in this job, you size up people pretty quickly. And I could tell he was a gentle type of kid," Valenti said.

The police officer doesn't usually dip into his own pockets for cases he comes across every day, but there are days that cops perform acts of kindness  without getting recognition from the public.

"At the end of the day, it's not about gratitude," Valenti said. "Most of us took this job to help people, not to hurt them. The job can be negative. For the most part, the job is dealing with good people having a very bad day so you're not seeing the best side of people."

When the teen first encountered the officer, he didn't have a positive view of the police.

"It seems like all that's represented (in the news) with police is the bad stuff, and it's a shame, because when I took this job 23 years ago, I didn't think everyone was going to hate you, which is sometimes the feeling you get as a police officer," Valenti said.

While responding to the call from the fitness center, Valenti realized that it wasn't a typical case of trespassing as the boy was just trying to play basketball and not cause any trouble. Even though he used to have a membership, he couldn't afford to continue to pay for one.

Valenti offered to pay $150 out of his own pocket to cover the cost of a membership for the boy. The officer then learned that the teen would only get a membership for three to four months with those funds.

That's when Pritchett put a call into the corporate office and described the situation.

Corporate was so taken by the officer's act of kindness that they offered to give the teen a membership for two-years for the $150 payment. The typical cost would have been $718, but X-Sport Fitness is picking up the rest of the bill.

"We all were flabbergasted here," Pritchett said. "I know X-Sport takes care of our members so after we ran a background check and found out he had had no other trouble, we went ahead."

Both Valenti and Pritchett later learned that the boy was an NBA hopeful, receiving national attention for his skills on the court.

"I'd rather have him playing ball than being on the street and possibly getting into trouble," he said.

The corporate office taking the officer's kindness one step further, shows that good deeds can be contagious.

"The good stories are not out there," said Officer Eric Swaback. "People don't always know about them. Police do good things all the time but, unfortunately, people have no way to hear about them."

Source: Chicago Tribune / ABC