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Applebee’s Waiter Returns $32,000 In Cash Left On Table

By Tara Dodrill
Published on: 05:52 PST, Dec 21, 2015

Applebee’s Waiter Update – The waiter who returned the $32,000 bag of cash has been identified as Brian Greery. The 32-year-old Fresno Applebee’s waiter initially thought the canvas pouch found beneath the table might contain a customer’s medication, according to a Huffington Post report. Greery said that his manager suggested they should look inside the bag to see if it did indeed contain medication or any other type of identifying items that could help locate the owner of the bag.

“I couldn’t believe it, I’d never seen so much cash in my life before,” Brian Greery said. “I’m a big believer in karma, I just feel like you treat others as you would want to be treated.”

An Applebee’s waiter is being heralded as the “kindest” waiter in the world today. The man found and returned a sack containing $32,000 in cash left on a table in the Fresno, California, restaurant. The honest man appears to have not been tempted to steal the cash, even though no security cameras existed in the section of the restaurant where the couple had been sitting.

Erika and Bertha Gonzalez, the relatives who left the $32,000 in cash on the Applebee’s table, are not from a wealthy family, nor had they just completed some type of illegal activity to fill the sack with a huge amount of cash. The Fresno family does not normally pack around such an enormous amount of cash and were planning on taking their business savings to a safe deposit box at the bank before dinner. Unfortunately for the small business owners, their bank did not have an empty safe deposit box, so they were forced to carry the bag of cash with them throughout the evening.

Erika Gonzalez told local reporters that she had absolutely no idea how she was going to tell her dad that the $32,000 bag of cash had been left on the table at Applebee’s and was gone forever. She said that she believes her mother accidentally took it out of her purse when fishing for her wallet to pay their bill. When Erika called the police to report the money missing and presumed stolen, the Fresno police officer said the sack of cash was sitting right in front of him at the station.

The Gonzalez family really wants to thank and reward the unidentified Applebee’s waiter, but he is graciously refusing their offer.

“I don’t know that he would accept it honestly,” Carrie Hellyer, the regional manager at Applebee’s said, according to an MSN report. “He’s just not that guy. He made it very clear that he did it because it was the right thing to do, not that he wanted anything in return.”

Hellyer went on to commend the waiter and noted that $32,000 is more than a year’s salary for many of her workers and could have increased the temptation to pocket the bag of cash. The Applebee’s manager said she considers herself very fortunate to have an employee who instinctively and immediately wanted to find the rightful owner of the money and see it returned.

Fresno Police Detective Sammy Ashworth told ABC 30 News that the money was obtained legally and the women are “just an average working family” and left the $32,000 bag of cash behind mistakenly at the restaurant.

“They described the bag that it was in and the denomination, and I determined that, yes, it was their money,” Detective Ashworth added.

In addition to turning down any reward, the Applebee’s waiter has no desire to step into the limelight and be interviewed. Even though they will likely not get to meet the man who safeguarded their savings, the Gonzalez family has thanked him profusely via the manager at the restaurant and the news media. Erika Gonzalez said that the savings would be used for the entire family to take a long-planned vacation to Puerta Vallarta and Guadalajara.

What do you think about the Fresno, California waiter returning the $32,000 bag of cash left on the Applebee’s table?

[Image via Shutterstock.com]

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