Family That Finds Close to $1M Sets 'Wonderful Example'

They turned bags of cash they found on Virginia road over to the police
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted May 22, 2020 7:29 AM CDT
Family That Finds Close to $1M Sets 'Wonderful Example'
What would you do if you stumbled upon this?   (Getty Images/conejota)

David and Emily Schantz couldn't take being cooped up inside during the pandemic last weekend, so they did what many families are doing these days: They packed the kids into the car for a drive. Per WTVR, Emily Schantz was the one behind the wheel Saturday in Goochland County, Virginia, when the vehicle in front of them suddenly swerved around something in the road. Schantz didn't have time to veer out of the way. "So they ran over the bag," Maj. Scott Moser of the Caroline County Sheriff's Office tells CNN. Not wanting to leave what they thought was garbage in the road, the Schantzes picked up that bag and threw it into the back of their pickup truck then drove on. They also retrieved a second bag spotted in a nearby ditch. The Schantzes then returned to their home in Caroline County, where they planned to throw out the bags with their own trash.

That's when they discovered that what was inside the bags wasn't garbage at all. Moser says that while they initially thought the bags' contents included a bunch of mail, it turned out to be a whole lot of cash instead: "plastic baggies ... addressed with something that said 'cash vault,'" Emily Schantz tells WTVR. The AP reports that the family contacted the Caroline County Sheriff's Office, and deputies who counted the money determined there was close to $1 million between the two bags. Investigators think the money belonged to the USPS and was on its way to being deposited at the bank, though they're still trying to figure out how the cash ended up in the road. "They saved someone a lot of money and set a wonderful example for everyone else," Moser says, per the AP. Schantz shrugs off their good deed, telling WTVR, "It didn't belong to us." (An upstate New York couple found $10,000 in a shopping cart.)

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