A homeless man who left $10,000 of a cash inheritance on a Florida bus bench got the money back recently thanks to a good Samaritan and the police.
Florida’s Sun-Sentinel reported that the man, identified only as Joe, received about $12,000 after a relative died. He went shopping and accidentally left two bags of purchases and about $10,000 on a bus stop bench in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the newspaper said.
"He knew it was left there, but he figured by the time he thought about going back to get it, it would be gone," Broward County Sheriff’s Detective Danny Mursell told the Sun-Sentinel.
John Harbett, a volunteer looking for turtle hatchlings in the early morning hours, found a bank envelope with nearly $4,000 in it on the bus bench June 4, Mursell said. He took it home to keep it safe before turning it in the next morning. The other envelope, along with the two bags of items Joe purchased, was found by Deputy Ben Koos.
"We obviously put two and two together and everything was in one location for a total of $9,500," Mursell told the newspaper. The police found a receipt with the purchased items, and they went searching for the owner. From surveillance video, they were eventually able to identify Joe.
Joe told police he planned to use the money to go to Pennsylvania to be with family and friends.
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time $10,000 has been found on a bench. In May, a man found a black pouch containing $10,500 on a playground bench. This good Samaritan, Sean Lee, had seen someone lying on the bench earlier, and he waited about three hours to return it, until the man showed up looking for
the pouch, The New Paper reported.
The man who lost it, Cui Hua Bi, was a Chinese national and the bulk of the money was what he had saved to send home to his family, the New Paper said.
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