An unemployed middle school teacher of College Station, Tex. recently found a bag containing $20,000 in cash on the side of the road this morning, and instead of keeping the money for herself, she returned it to the closest Chase bank, KBTX reports.
Candace Scott, a former middle school teacher, was driving home after dropping off her cat at the veterinarian on Tuesday when she noticed a bag on the street with a Chase bank label, and pulled over to retrieve it. She at first doubted the bag was worth anything of value.
"It looked like a gallon-size baggie with a blue zipper on top," Scott said to KBTX. "It just barely caught my eye, and I thought it was money, then was like, 'Nah, it's probably a dirty diaper.'"
After circling around to see a dump truck running over the bag in the middle of the left turn lane, Scott stopped to pick it up and discovered she had been wrong.
"There were two huge bundles of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in rubber bands," Scott said. "The bag had ripped open because of the dump truck, but other than that it was just laying there."
At 8 a.m. she pounded on the windows of a local Chase branch to get the attention of a local branch manager before the bank opened for business. The bank manager thanked Scott for returning the money.
"[The manager] said, 'That's our ATM money. We just had a courier service come and get that'," Scott told the news station. "She told me I'm the most honest person in the world, and I said 'or the dumbest.'"
Scott didn't know exactly how much money she had returned until Greg Hassell, a Houston-based spokesman for Chase, said Wednesday that the bag contained about $20,000 in bills, according to the Lubboc-Avalance Journal.
"I found something that didn't belong to me...and I wanted to return it to the person it belonged to," Scott told KBTX. Chase Bank rewarded her with a $500 gift card.
"We are very grateful to Ms. Scott for stepping up, doing the right thing and returning the bag dropped by our courier service. It is that neighborly spirit that makes College Station a great place to live," said Chase Bank in a statement sent to a local news station, News 3.
