A homeless man named Joe recently had a bit of good luck, inheriting some much-needed money from a deceased relative. Unfortunately, after withdrawing $10,000 of it and going on a little shopping spree, he left the rest of the cash on a bench.
He never went back for it, figuring that by the time he did, someone would’ve helped himself to his $10,000 , the Sun Sentinel reported.
Lucky for him, the right people in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida, spotted his money.
The homeless man was actually left $12,000. He withdrew $10,000 from a Wells Fargo bank account earlier this month, stuffed the cash in two envelopes, then headed to a local mall to do some clothes shopping. He spent about $500.
At some point that day, he left the envelopes and a couple bags of merchandise on a bus bench.
A couple days later, at 6:30 in the morning, Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Koos spotted the bags and turned them into a detective. He’d found one envelope inside, filled with half of the homeless man’s inheritance , CBS Miami reported.
But that wasn’t the only envelope of cash the police came into contact with that day.
Much earlier that morning — sometime between 3 and 5 a.m. — John Harbett was looking for turtle hatchlings while on volunteer beach patrol. Instead of turtles, he found the second envelope, and the other half of Joe’s money.
But he didn’t pocket it. He took it home so no one else would. Then, he visited the police and handed it over.
“We obviously put two and two together and everything was in one location for a total of $9,500,” Detective Danny Mursell said.
Luckily, though, officers found a receipt from a clothing store in one of the bags. They went to the shop and an employee remembered the homeless man, and that he’d bought a T-shirt. Police got a surveillance photo and spent the next couple days searching
“One of our guys got word that [Joe] was seen over in Pompano, so I spent (a couple) mornings and … evenings driving around Pompano and I never found him,” Mursell said.
But how they ended up finding Joe was another stroke of luck.
“For a completely different reason, I was downtown in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and I looked over and he was standing there drinking a cup of coffee in front of me. He wasn’t sure about how to go about getting his property back.”
They confirmed that the $10,000 belonged to the homeless man, which of course it did. Mursell said the fact that Harbett’s didn’t keep the find for himself renewed his faith.
As for Joe, he’s going to use his $10,000 to move to Pennsylvania and live with family and friends.
[Photo Courtesy David McNew/Getty Images]
