This week’s good people post is a bit different than my usual fare, but it’s a story that touched my heart, even brought a tear to my eye, and I hope you will find it inspiring, too.

Ginny Schrappen was in her mid-fifties back in 1998 when one day her church deacon handed her a letter.  It was from a man in prison who was just hoping to find someone … anyone … who would take a few minutes to write back to him.  Ginny did write back and their letter-writing continued for 25 years until earlier this month when Ginny finally got to meet her long-term pen pal face-to-face, hug-to-hug.

Ginny’s pen pal is Lamar Johnson, a man who was wrongfully convicted in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1994.  Johnson had been convicted of murder for the October 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd, who was shot dead on his front porch by two masked men. Police and prosecutors claimed Johnson gunned Boyd down during a dispute over drug money, despite the fact that he said he was not home at the time and despite the fact there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene.

Since that day in 1998 when Ginny penned the first letter, she and Lamar have continued to correspond regularly.  Eventually, Johnson’s case came to the attention of the Midwest Innocence Project and, long story short, they were able to prove that prosecutors had manipulated evidence, and along with the confession of another person, Lamar Johnson’s sentence was finally vacated after 28 years of his life spent in prison.

And just last week, he went to visit the pen pal with whom he had corresponded for a quarter of a century … take a look  …

Ginny says that from the very first letter she believed he was innocent of the murder, and she never lost faith in him, never stopped writing.  She truly was a “rainbow in his cloud.”  I think she is absolutely a ‘good people’, don’t you?