Eight-Year-Old Donates $1,000 Prize to Cancer Stricken Neighbor

Before eight-year-old Wyatt Erber entered a scavenger hunt set up by a local bank he told his neighbor Trisha Kielty that if he won, he would donate the prize to the treatment of her two-year-old daughter Cara, who is battling leukemia.

The prize was nothing to sneeze at -- $1,000. But such a sum also suggests the chances of Wyatt winning the hunt would be slight, because if $1,000 prizes were easy to collect, we'd all be rich.

Lo-and-behold, Wyatt pulled it off. And, true to his word, the third-grader at Columbus Elementary School in Edwardsville, Ill passed the cash on to Kietly.

"I wanted to give it to them," he explained. "I didn't know what to do with it."

"I'm completely floored by him," Kielty said in response to the youngster's gesture. 'To step up and donate his winnings … is crazy."

Ever since Cara was diagnosed with cancer the Kietly's neighbors have rallied around the family, raising money for them through bake sales and caring for their other children when they spend time with Cara in the hospital.

But Wyatt's donation comes with it the added bonus of generating even more generosity, as a charity group has already matched his grand and folks who have read about the story on the internet are beginning to send funds.

Cara still faces an expensive and grueling two-and-a-half years of treatment. The good news is her type of leukemia has a 90% cure rate. So it seems like this touching tale will ultimately have a happy ending.