A family from Caroline County in Virginia recently stumbled upon a huge amount of cash. Well, drove upon it is more like it. The Schantz family was driving when they ran over some bags in the middle of the road. They pulled over and threw the bags in the back of their truck and kept going. They thought at that time that the bags were full of trash and had been illegally dumped or lost from a truck. But, it wasn’t until they reached home and examined the bags that they realized they were actually heavy mailbags that were full of many small parcels of cash.
Each cash bundle was marked “cash vault” and the family turned the money over to the Caroline County Sheriff’s Department. It is now believed that the nearly $1M was headed for the BB & T bank as a transfer from the U.S. Postal Service that somehow went wrong.
“They came back to Caroline, and found out they’d been riding around with almost a million dollars in the truck,” said Scott Moser of the Caroline County Sheriff’s Department.
Moser also said he thought that the family should be given a reward for turning in all that cash. In many areas it is illegal to not make some reasonable effort to find the owner of large amounts of cash. However, some folks might have taken the opportunity to squirrel the cash away. Emily Schantz said of the family’s decision to return the money, “Do the right thing and return it. Because it didn’t belong to us.”
You can see more about this unusual incident in the video below from local station WTVR CBS 6.