Posted on 10/05/2007 4:53:00 AM PDT by rawhide
ST. PETERSBURG - Many, many bags are delivered to the county solid waste compound, but most contain trash and they're dumped deliberately.
This one ended up in the middle of the road, well short of the dump, and apparently by accident. Inside was $65,000 in cash.
"I pick it up and it is loaded with money," said Debbie Cole, a scale-house supervisor who spotted the bag during a break. "I go, 'Oh my gosh.'"
"I've never seen that much money before," she said. "When I realized how much money it was, I started shaking."
The bag apparently fell off an armored truck from the Loomis armored transport company, which had made its first stop of the day at the Pinellas County Utilities solid waste center, 3095 114th Ave N., county officials said.
Cole, a 53-year-old grandmother, did the right thing. She contacted her supervisor, the two women put the bag in a box, and they took it to another supervisor.
Did Cole contemplate keeping the bag of unmarked $50s and $100s, more than double what she makes in a year?
"Everybody's asking me that," she said. "No, the thought never entered my mind to take the money, and I don't feel it would enter anybody's mind who works here."
"It was just a matter of who to call to get it where."
Cole felt bad for the Loomis employee responsible for the oversight.
"I really thought of the poor guy because I'm saying he's really going to be in trouble … He lost this money," she said.
Mark Clark, a spokesman for Loomis, headquartered in Houston, acknowledged a mistake was made.
"We did inadvertently drop the bag," Clark said. "It was an embarrassing and rare mistake. It will be investigated and I'm sure whoever made the mistake will face some repercussion."
Clark could not say who the cash belonged to, where it was coming from or where it was going.
Cole begins her shift at 5:45 a.m. as a scale-house service specialist II, assigning employees to scales where they will work weighing the day's take. Because she also handles deposits, she is familiar with the red-striped Loomis bags.
Taking her break at 7 a.m., Cole recognized the Loomis sack. The big surprise came when she saw a bundle with a $10,000 wrapper inside and a sheet tallying the number of $50 and $100 bills, she said.
"If I had won the lottery and won $65,000, I would have retired, paid my health insurance and spent time with my granddaughter, Lena," Cole said.
its stories like this that revive my faith in the goodness of humanity. With so much negative going around its good to see a positive.
So, I'm picturing a flat-bed truck, with bags of cash balanced on the bed. Truck hits a bump and a bag goes flying up and comes down in the road. Is that how this goes?
Or maybe it's like my coffee cup the other day -- the guard is holding the bag of money, and fumbling with his keys. He puts the bag on top of his truck, gets his key in the door, starts up the truck and drives away, with the bag of money still perched on top of his cab, and it falls off a block later. Maybe?
Good for her. I hope she gets a reward.
Y’know, I juat happened to drop a bag with $65,000 in cash on the highway earlier this week. I’d bet it’s mine!
Hey I dropped one too. Mine had a dollar sign on the side.
Did anyone find any $20 bills lying around, with a picture of Andrew Jackson on them? If you find any with Jackson on them, those ones are mine. Oh, and I lost some $100 bills that had Franklin’s face on them, too.
Well, the dollar is sinking.
Screw that, I would have kept the money, but would have waited a month to spend it so the news of it being lost would have trailed off. That’s just the libertarian in me, I guess. :-)
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