Indiana boy gives scavenger-hunt winnings to 2-year-old sick neighbor

Wyatt Erber gave the money to Cara Kielty’s mom, Trisha, and said, ‘How much chemo will $1,000 buy Cara?’ The 8-year-old spent all summer trying to win the scavenger hunt.

Wyatt Erber and Cara Keilty, a 2-year-old who was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Erber donated a $1,000 he won to Keilty's family.

An 8-year-old boy in Indiana is proof that kindness knows no age.

After winning $1000 in a neighborhood scavenger hunt, the youngster promptly handed the cash over to his sick neighbor — a 2-year-old girl battling leukemia.

“He said: ‘How much chemo will $1000 buy Cara?” the girl’s mother, Trisha Kielty, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I’m completely floored by him. To step up and donate his winnings ... is crazy.”

Noelle Erber helped her son Wyatt, a third-grader in Edwardsville, Ill., collect the clues to win the summer-long scavenger hunt, which was sponsored by a local bank.

“Wyatt immediately said, ‘Let’s do it, and if I win the $1000, I want to give it to Cara,” Erber told ABC News. “The idea of being able to give a thousand dollars wowed him.”

Cara had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia just a week earlier. The families have been friends and neighbors for five years, and while Wyatt comes over to play with Cara’s older brother, Connor, he’s also close to the young girl.

“She grins ear-to-ear whenever Wyatt walks through the door,” Kielty told ABC News.

She says she was hesitant to accept money from a child, and tried to protest to Wyatt’s mom, but decided to respect the boy’s wishes and “focus on the fact that Wyatt is such a gracious kid.”

The act of generosity has since prompted several others. One man mailed the Keiltys a note, saying, “We need more kids like Wyatt,” and included a $100 bill. And a local charity matched Wyatt’s donation, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

A spokeswoman for the bank that put on the scavenger hunt says employees “got goose bumps” when they heard what Wyatt had done.

“It’s just the sweetest thing that he’s been playing all summer long for her,” Rachel Case of the First Clover Leaf Bank told the newspaper. “I don’t know any 8-year-olds who would do this.”

Cara is reportedly responding well to cancer treatments