A 17-year-old grocery bagger was ready to wash his hands in the bathroom at the Federal Way supermarket where he works when he saw a brown canvas money bag on the floor. Moisei Baraniuc was curious. He opened it and saw envelopes filled with money – “a pretty thick stack.”
Thick enough to add up to $10,000.
Stuffed with 50- and hundred-dollar bills, the bag contained the life savings of a Vancouver, Wash., man who accidentally left it in the men’s bathroom at Top Food & Drug on Nov. 13.
Baraniuc, a senior at Todd Beamer High School in Federal Way, didn’t know the whole story at the time. He just put the bag on the counter and washed his hands while he thought.
“The first thing that went through my mind was keeping it,” he said.
And then the Ukrainian immigrant remembered what his father, Vitalie Baraniuc, always says at dinner at the family’s home in Pacific.
“My dad is always telling us in this life you’ve got to work for yourself,” said Baraniuc, who goes by the nickname Moses. “If you take what doesn’t belong to you, it will catch up to you.”
Thanks for doing the right thing. You're a good man. And thanks to your caregivers for raising you with the emotional intelligence to think beyond yourself.
1 comments:
In a CNN on-line poll today, 59 percent of readers say they would not keep the money. Funny, $10,000 doesn't seem like as much as it used to be. Many years when I was growing up on a farm in Indiana (1950's), that was our family income in a good year. Now, the government couldn't buy a half-page report for that much.
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