The owner of the bag was building a church in Guatemala

Nov 20, 2012 16:00 GMT  ·  By

Police in Beverly, Massachusetts praise a good Samaritan who found a bag full of cash in a supermarket and turned it in, intact.

Cheryl Gavazzi was shopping at a Marshalls in Swampscott when she noticed the bag. The Inquisitr writes it was just hanging on a rack, and she thought it was on display. In fact she considered buying the Vera Bradley bag and looked inside to see if it was spacious.

Imagine her surprise as she found not only $11,000 (€8,500), but also diapers and immunization records for several children. Gavazzi was terrified, believing she had stumbled on a bag that used to belong to drug dealers, and that she was in grave danger.

“'This is a drug thing,' was my first thought. [...] 'I’m going to get killed,'” she says, confessing her motivation was trying to save her own life.

She tried returning the bag, walking for 10 minutes around the isles, hoping she would be spotted by someone who would return and claim it. Her search was fruitless, and she had an appointment at a hair salon, so she brought it home, and asked her husband not to touch it.

It wasn't until she finished her errands that night that she went to the Beverly police and turned in the money. The owner, a man from Lynn, had reported it stolen earlier that day.

The man who alerted law enforcement about the bag explained he was a Guatemala native, and that he had raised money to build a church there, producing receipts that attested to his story.

He was shopping with his wife, put down the bag for a moment and then forgot about it. It is possible that another shopper picked it up and placed it on the rack, not knowing what it contained.

The owner was overjoyed, even giving Gavazzi a reward. If he hadn't recovered the money, he would have had to replace it out of his own pocket.

“He was wondering how he was going to come up with that money because it wasn’t his money. At that point, he was going to be selling his car if he had to,” she says.