A noble, selfless Florida man is being heralded as a hero after he demanded no reward for turning in a large bag of money that he’d found.
The $30,023 in cash was recovered by Luis Salavar, 58, inside a Wawa convenience store bathroom on May 3, according to The Washington Post.
“I saw it, and I grabbed it, and I tried to locate the person that was there,” Salavar later recalled to Palm Beach station WPBF.
He was telling the truth. Surveillance cameras reviewed by the police confirmed that he first searched the Wawa and its parking lot for the owner before leaving in his white Ford van.
While inside the Ford, Salavar actually opened the fanny pack to look for identification and discovered over $30,000, mostly in $100 and $50 bills.
“My heart just dropped,” he recalled. “My body was just numb, just seeing all this money that belonged to somebody else.”
He reportedly spent days afterward trying to find the owner.
If you found a large amount of money, would you try to find the owner or treat it like finders keepers?
Give it back: 0% (0 Votes)
Keep it: 0% (0 Votes)
Meanwhile, the owner of the fanny pack, who asked not to be publicly identified, thought he was screwed when — after visiting the Wawa and its bathroom — he realized he’d forgotten the bag at the store. When he returned to the Wawa, it was gone.
“My freaking money’s gone. I’m out of all this bread. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he recounted thinking, according to WPBF.
The $30,023 was money he’d earned from selling his Pokémon collectibles. It was also money that he’d planned to use to help his sister pay for a medical procedure.
Upon discovering that the fanny pack was gone, the owner called Riviera Beach Police Department, which in turn launched a grand theft investigation and search for the missing fanny pack.
The owner had little hope for a resolution.
“I thought I was absolutely screwed,” he told The Washington Post.
He was wrong.
Using the Wawa store’s surveillance camera, the police tracked the fanny pack to Salavar’s van. When they found and contacted him on Thursday, they requested that he come to the police station to hand over the pack to its owner. He eagerly complied.
“So, I give him his bag,” Salavar said. “‘This is yours.’ And he was crying. And he hugged me.”
“I was just thankful to get my money back, to be completely honest,” the owner of the fanny pack said, adding that he was shocked by Salavar’s honesty and forthrightness.
“I was pretty astonished that anybody would have done that,” he noted. “Think about it. That’s life-changing money. People would kill for that kind of money.”
Salavar for his part doesn’t seem to believe he did anything particularly special.
“If something doesn’t belong to you, you didn’t earn it. Give it back. Be kind,” he told WPBF, adding in a separate statement to The Washington Post that he’d never even considered keeping the money.
“$30,000 is great, but it’s not mine to keep — I like to earn my money,” he said, taking note of the fact that he works in construction.
He also rejected an offer from the fanny pack’s owner for free dinner.
“I just did the right thing,” Salavar insisted. “I don’t need to be put on a pedestal.”
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