Garden Grove, California resident Candida Torre was devastated when she lost her son Jose while he was deployed in Iraq.

Jose was only 21 and was serving as a combat engineer when his unit was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Baghdad. Jose was killed in the blast, and Candida had an incredibly difficult time dealing with the loss.

Just before he passed away, Jose used the money he earned from serving in the U.S. military to buy a new car.

Jose could not have been more proud of his sleek, black Nissan Cube, and Candida  had been driving it during his deployment. After he passed away, Candida knew she had to keep the car, as driving it made her feel closer to him.

Sadly, Candida ended up getting in an accident in her son’s car, which was totally destroyed. Candida was inconsolable, as it felt like she was losing her son all over again.

The vehicle had extensive front-end damage and Candida’s insurance declared it as a total loss. When Officer John Baggs got to  the scene, he noticed something very unusual that caught his eye.

Baggs noticed that Candida was wearing Jose’s dog tags, and he also saw a gold star license plate on the car, which is a symbol that a family member was killed during active duty in the military. This touched Baggs, as his father served two tours in Vietnam, later joining the National Guard where he perished in a Veteran’s Day plane crash in 1976.

As soon as Baggs saw the dog tags, he knew he needed to help.

“I thought, well, I work with some great people and I knew I could pass around a couple envelopes and probably buy this car before they scrap it, and maybe start working on getting it fixed,” Officer Baggs said. “And I mentioned that to AAA. And after about an hour they got back to me and said, ‘We’re just going to donate it to you.”

Local repair shop Caliber Collision volunteered to fix the car for free after hearing the story.

“Everybody at my shop actually went ahead and touched the car,” David Perez, from Caliber Collision, explained. “For them, it felt more than just repairing a car. It felt like we were restoring somebody to the rhythm of their life.”

They didn’t just repair the vehicle, they also added some special touches to it!

“On the back windshield is a tattoo that [Jose] and his platoon had,” said David Goldstein, also from Caliber Collision. “And there’s one on the dashboard.”

When Candida’s family brought her to the Huntington Beach Police Department helicopter hangar, she thought she was just going for a simple helicopter ride.

“It all started making sense when [Officer Baggs] started talking about the collaboration [between AAA and Caliber Collision],” she said. “I was looking around trying to find my family, and I couldn’t find them, and then the car appeared.”

“It’s so nice to know that there are people in the world that have a good heart and are willing to pay it forward,” she said, afterward.

Watch Candida’s full reaction in the video below, and SHARE this story so your friends and family can see this as well!