A 20-year-old volunteer firefighter was driving along the highway Sunday when he spotted an odd package on the side of the road, at the intersection of highways 394 and 421. He stopped to inspect it and inside, found more than $1,000 cash and nothing else. He took it straight to the police department.
“There aren’t many young men like him, who would turn in this much money,” Bristol Tennessee Police Capt. Charlie Thomas said.
The man requested that he remain anonymous.
Now police are looking to return the cash to whoever lost it. So, Thomas said, they are not releasing the exact amount to the public and expect the owner to know, down to the dollar, how much was there.
“If I lost that kind of money, I’d be sick over it,” Thomas said.
He recalled a man who once picked up a wallet, packed with $3,800 in $100 bills, at the Bristol Motor Speedway. The man turned it over to police, who found its rightful owner. Another person discovered more than $8,000 tucked under their hotel-room mattress. That stack of cash sat in police lock up for a year and its owner never came, Thomas said. So police returned it to the person who found it.
“I’m sure another person in another situation in life, someone who didn’t have this man’s principles, might have just hurried off with the money and said, well, the universe gave this to me, finder’s keepers, no harm done,” said Stephen G. Post, director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassion Care and Bioethics in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York. “But if you did a survey, about half of people would not want to benefit from some else’s resources.”
Post said that in studies where people are given extra change at a store, it’s split about even between those who return the money and the ones who slink off with it in their pockets.
Virtue, he said, is not an innate part of us. It is born in culture, religion, our upbringing and associations.
“These things tend to capture the imagination,” he said. “The very idea that somehow honesty could have a deep priority over greed in the life of an individual is hard for some folks to grasp, but it’s actually very common.”
Post was not surprised to learn the mystery finder is a volunteer firefighter.
“It makes perfect sense,” he said. It is in communities that value helpfulness and a sense of social obligation, such as fire stations, where the power of character is learned.
“Some people are very much shaped by certain principles that really are not subject to practical considerations or needs; they simply stand on their own,” Post said. “To do other than return that money would be a violation of integrity. It’s a question of moral conscience, and their ultimate ability to live with themselves. Other’s simply don’t have that.”
To stake a claim at the lost highway cash, contact Capt. Charlie Thomas at (423) 989-5531 or Lt. Debbie McCauley at (423) 989-5568.
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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