Florida man discovers fanny pack full of $30k and tries to find its owner. His search is cut short when the police calls him

Everyone has a nightmare scenario involving losing a wallet or purse with a couple of notes inside that would definitely inconvenience you for a while. The real worry is usually the tedious process of replacing all those cards — now imagine if you were also carrying $30,000 in cash. Turns out you’d probably be just fine if you lost your bag in Florida and got lucky enough for it to be found by a man named Luis Salazar.

Florida has long carried its fair share of judgment from the rest of the country. Whenever you see Florida making headlines, you’re probably more likely to read about a man claiming that trees are stalking him or another insisting he can teleport like an X-Men character. So it’s understandable why people often expect the worst whenever a story comes out of the Sunshine State.

But Salazar proved that good people — and by extension good stories — can come from any corner of the world. He was at a Wawa convenience store in Riviera Beach on May 3. Salazar had simply stopped there to use the restroom when he noticed a fanny pack hanging from a safety rail.

Being the kind of man he is, Salazar first tried to figure out who might have lost the bag. With very little to go on, he eventually decided to open it to check whether there was any identification inside. Instead, he found $30,023 in cash. According to People, Salazar later recalled the discovery by saying, “My body was just numb, just seeing all this money that belonged to somebody else.”

Salazar was eventually contacted by Riviera Beach Police Department to follow up on the situation. According to People, the bag’s rightful owner had fortunately already reported losing a fanny pack full of cash. Police had reportedly been reviewing security footage to help determine what exactly happened to the missing bag at the convenience store.

Salazar later shared that when he finally returned the bag full of money to its rightful owner, the man was actually in tears. Reportedly, the owner immediately opened the pack to make sure every bill was still there. To the very last dollar, everything was untouched. The owner said, “I was pretty astonished that anybody would have done that.”

Salazar later explained that he was simply acting according to how he was raised — with honesty and integrity. He said, “It’s not my money to take. I was not raised that way.” Lately, there have been countless reasons to distrust your neighbor. The powers that be constantly preach that society should operate with an “either me or them” mentality, but moments like this are a reminder that reality is often much kinder than that.

What makes this story especially fascinating is that neither side even mentioned the possibility of a reward. As far as anyone knows, Salazar simply did what he believed was right and expected absolutely nothing in return for the good deed. Honestly, there’s probably a lot the rest of us could learn from that.