“May I pray for you to be safe?” It was a simple gesture that an 8-year-old girl extended to a group of police officers having lunch in a San Antonio, Texas, cafeteria. Paige was simply following her instinct. “I did it because I believe in Jesus, and I think they needed a prayer right then,” as she said to KABB in San Antonio.
Little did the young girl know those officers were still in mourning for a fallen fellow officer who had been killed a month earlier. But the prayer was just part of what Paige does on a daily basis. “Always pray for people, even when you don’t know them,” she urges. “One day they’re really going to need it.”
Paige Vasquez looks just like any other kid her age, but behind her big smile and bright eyes lies a surprising confidence and maturity. “It just amazes me just because she’s so young,” her mom, Kat Garcia, told
Inside Edition. “She has a very old soul. It’s just something that comes to her naturally.”
When Paige and her grandmother walked into the Luby’s restaurant in July 2017, they saw a large group of police officers sitting down for lunch. The girl was on a mission to pray for them. “I felt like I really needed to do that, because I felt like they really needed it,” she told
KSAT. She walked over to the table and asked, “May I pray for you to be safe and so that God may take care of y'all?” Her grandmother said that the officers all bowed their heads in unison and were moved by the gesture.
What Paige and her family didn’t know was that the San Antonio Police Department was mourning the death of one of their officers killed in the line of duty just four days before. Officer Miguel Moreno had been shot and killed on July 1, 2017, in the line of duty while investigating a burglary. As Chief of Police William McManus told
MySA, “I’m at a loss for words to describe what a tragedy this is. Imagine one of your relatives was shot and killed on the street for apparently no reason.”
Given the difficult time for the police community, Paige’s simple prayer was especially meaningful. A photo taken of the encounter went viral, garnering over 4,000 likes and 4,000 shares to date. She told
Inside Edition, “Sometimes a little prayer can make someone’s day so I decided to do that just in case they’re having a rough day.”
Paige gets her strong support for law enforcement and first responders from her grandmother and her mom. As Garcia told Inside Edition, “They have husbands, wives, daughters, everything like that.”
Paige has extended her prayer efforts to other people in need—anyone whom she thinks might need a little boost. “We’ve been to Chick-Fil-a, where she’s gone and said a prayer for a police officer waiting for her order,” her mom told
KSAT. “We’ve gone to the emergency room with (Paige), and she’s over here, sick, and she’s praying over the doctor that’s helping her.”
When stomach pains left Paige’s mom and grandmother fearing for the little girl’s health, they took her to the hospital and discovered that she has celiac disease, an intolerance for gluten. As grandmother Martha Bosquez explained on Facebook, “She prayed that God guides the [Doctor] while treating sick people, praying that he did not get sick.”
It ultimately turned out that the connection between Paige and the San Antonio Police Department went even deeper. While being interviewed about her kind act for the officers on July 5 by KSAT, her mother realized that the slain officer was Miguel Moreno, whom she and her kids had met a couple of months before while he was on patrol.
“[Moreno] was driving down and, I guess, making his rounds, kind of, checking up on the block. And he saw the kids, and the kids were jumping up and down, and they were waving to him, and he actually stopped,“ Garcia told KSAT. ”[Paige] said a little prayer for him to be safe and then he was just standing there playing with the kids.”
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