Article content continued

“They think he is sick and has mental issues … but I know he does not,” wrote Mr. Wright’s teenaged daughter, Chelsey, in a Sunday night Facebook post.

Since Thursday, she wrote, her father has been held in the psychiatric ward of Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, all because “he had some extra money so he decided to share it around with some homeless and needy people in Halifax and Dartmouth.”

And strangely, Mr. Wright was hospitalized in P.E.I. only hours after his mental condition had been given a pass by Halifax psychiatrists.

On Tuesday in Dartmouth, Mr. Wright’s “suspicious” generosity prompted Halifax Police to pull over his SUV and summon the city’s Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team for an assessment.

“He was let go … he wasn’t breaching any act or any laws, “ said Const. Pierre Bourdages, spokesman for the Halifax Regional Police.

By Monday, the hospitalized Mr. Wright had become a virtual folk hero in the Nova Scotia capital. In a series of stories in Metro Halifax, elated recipients described his actions as a “blessing,” “doing the world good” or proof of “a few good people left in the world.”

On the newspaper’s Facebook page, resident Brennan Maher described Mr. Wright approaching him and saying, “Hey, I got something for you.”

He added, “at first I thought he was going to stab me or something but then he handed me a $100 bill and two 50 cent pieces, one from 1960 and the other from 1951.”

‘I think he did a good job for mankind’

Most accounts had the man telling his recipients to thank God or “pass it along,” although one woman, writing a post to the Metro Halifax website, said that the man told her of a movement “coming to take back the wealth” and said that early 20th century inventor Nikola Tesla “was working on free energy but was silenced by those who wanted financial control.”