(CNN) -- This ketchup thief may have gotten away with a crime, but karma still kicked in.
A thief swiped a bottle of ketchup from Perkins Restaurant & Bakery in New Jersey, but the person, so racked with guilt, went to Walmart, bought two 32-oz. bottles of Heinz Ketchup, and left them in a bag outside the restaurant with a note.
"A few hours [after] I did it, someone crashed into my car, and since then karma, luck, and life have been sh**," the thief wrote in the note, left on Wednesday night. "I hope returning two new bottles will restore some for me, and I can stop carrying around this guilt."
The restaurant manager found the bag while she was closing, and showed it to the owner of the franchise location, Maria DiLeo, the next morning.
"I really felt bad," DiLeo told CNN, referring to the unnamed thief with the pronoun "she." "She's got to be 17, 18, 19. I really did feel bad."
DiLeo took a picture and posted it on her town's public Facebook page "just to say, 'You're forgiven.'"
But apparently the thief still had some good karma left. DiLeo's story got the attention of officials at Heinz who, in addition to granting the thief "good ketchup karma," offered to help pay some of the car damages.
The thief came forward privately, and now we can only assume the good karma has been restored.
DiLeo, for her part, said she never would've even noticed the missing bottle.
"I do believe in karma," she said. "But not over a ketchup bottle."
The-CNN-Wire
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