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Arizona grandmother who invited wrong teen for Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 just had him over for third year in a row

Wanda Dench had first invited Jamal Hinton to a Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 by mistake, but is now good friends with the teen and just had him over for the third year running

What started as an innocent case of mistaken identity has now evolved into a Thanksgiving tradition for 19-year-old Jamal Hinton and a story that has brightened the days of hundreds of thousands of social media users who have kept a close tab on it.

Before Thanksgiving 2016, grandmother Wanda Dench from Mesa, Arizona, wanted to send a group text message to a few family members to invite them over to her residence for dinner on Thanksgiving Day. However, one of her grandsons had changed his numbers a few months before and forgotten to update Dench, resulting in the grandma sending out an invitation to the then-17-year-old Valley high schooler Hinton.