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Turlock High Janitor Returns $3,400 Found In Garbage Can To Owner

TURLOCK (CBS13) — His job is to throw away the trash, but it's a good thing he didn't two weeks ago.

The Turlock High School custodian discovered thousands of dollars in a garbage can.

Bill Lowe may hold a day job, but he could add another title to his resume: good Samaritan.

"It's one of those things that's not real—surreal," he said.

It began as an ordinary day. Bill was cleaning the classrooms when he got to a room with a jacket on a trash can.

Normally he'd just dump the trash, but his curiosity got the best of him: Who would wear a jacket in the middle of May during a week of hot weather. Something didn't seem right.

"I just removed it, dumped the trash, and then I went back to the jacket," he said.

Bill, wanting to return the jacket to its owner, opened the pockets to look for identification. Instead he found something he never expected.

"I opened one up pulled out the envelope, and through the window of the envelope I could see that it was $100 bills," he said.

Then he opened the other pocket.

"The second envelope is where I thought I just kind of froze and stared at it," he said.

In total, he found $3,400.

"I pinched myself, and then uh I called my supervisor 52," he said.

The school resource officer gave a bank slip inside one of the envelopes to the credit union, where a worker tracked down the owner.

The owner, who didn't want his identification released, says he lost his jacket in January 2013 at a swap meet inside the Stanislaus County Fairground. It may have been gone forever, had it not fallen into Bill Lowe's hands.

"It feels good knowing that it's going to be returned to the rightful owner because times are tough," he said.

But how did that jacket get from the swap meet to the school?

The principal says some students worked at the swap meet and may have picked it up.

It's not the first time Bill has found money.

He once spotted a wallet with a lot of money in it at a Walmart parking lot. He turned that in too.

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