Florida resident Luis Salazar went through something many of us have experienced: he found someone’s lost property, a fanny pack, in a convenience store bathroom. Who hasn’t gone to a public restroom to find a dropped wallet, backpack, or purse and tried to return it to its rightful owner? For Salazar, though, there was a another factor: the lost fanny pack contained $30,000 in cash.
On a Sunday afternoon, Salazar was using a Wawa gas station restroom in Riviera Beach, Florida. That’s when he noticed a fanny pack hanging on the safety railing. Salazar figured that the person who had used the restroom before him had accidentally left it behind. He tried to see if the fanny pack’s owner was still at the Wawa, but no luck.
Salazar opened the fanny pack hoping to find some identification inside so he could return it to its rightful owner. While he couldn’t find a drivers license or any other ID, he did find something else: a thick pile of cash. In fact, it was $30,023.
“My body was just numb, just seeing all this money that belonged to somebody else,” Salazar said to WPBF News.
What do you do with a lost fanny pack filled with $30K?
Salazar knew exactly what to do. He kept the money safe in the fanny pack and continued his search for the rightful owner.
As Salazar spent days looking for the owner, the owner finally noticed his $30,000 dollar-filled fanny pack was missing, and called the local police to help him find it.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, my freaking money’s gone. I’m out of all this bread. I don’t know what I’m going to do,’” the owner said to WPBF News, declining to be identified.
After reviewing the Wawa convenient store security footage, the police were able to identify both the fanny pack owner and Salazar. They contacted Salazar who happily brought over the fanny pack to the police station with every single dollar still inside. The fanny pack owner cried and hugged Salazar, thanking him for finding and returning it.
The owner was incredibly grateful that an honest person found his lost pack.
“I was pretty astonished that anybody would have done that,” he said. “Think about it. That’s life-changing money. People would kill for that kind of money.”
Meanwhile, Salazar just did what he thought was natural.
“If something doesn’t belong to you, you didn’t earn it. Give it back. Be kind,” said Salazar. “It’s not my money to take. I was not raised that way.”
Most people are honest people
While acts of honesty like Salazar’s should be celebrated, there are more people like him than you would think. A 2019 study researched human behavior by dropping over 17,000 “lost” wallets in 40 countries over the course of two years. The results found that wallets with money inside were more likely to be reported than those without cash. In fact, the more cash inside the wallet, the more likely it was reported.
“The highest reporting rate was found in the condition where the wallet included $100,” the study’s lead researcher Alain Cohn told NPR. “Forty-six percent of wallets with no money were reported, compared with 61% of those with about $13 and 72% of those with nearly $100.”
So Luis Salazar’s behavior was part of something that is (thankfully) more normal than most would expect.
“I guess maybe there’s just more good people in the world than most people think,” said the fanny pack owner. “You never know who you’ll run into, and Luis is just one of those good people.”
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