Robert Adams thought someone was playing a trick when he saw a plastic bag filled with money lying on the ground in a surburban Chicago strip mall.
Adams said the bag he found outside a Chase Bank was filled with lots of bills — a little more than $17,000, as police later determined.
“At the ATM, I glanced down and I saw a clear plastic bag with what looked like money in it, but I thought, you know, maybe someone’s horsing around and put napkins in it or something or other,” Adams said. “So I picked it up, but it was money.”
The bag contained an ATM-style Chase receipt, so Adams brought it into the nearby bank branch, thinking an employee had dropped it. Employees informed him that they had not misplaced a bag of cash, so Adams took the money home.
Adams, 54, said he never thought of keeping the money for himself.
“I was just interested to know whose money it was, and how it got there,” Adams said. “I’ve found small amounts of money before, but I was just thinking, ‘This is not right.'”
Robert Adams was on his way home to Arlington Heights (another Chicago suburb) when he stopped at the ATM to get cash to buy a burrito. He later called Rolling Meadows police and reported the find.
They figured out that the money was supposed to go to an ATM in a neighboring suburb. The armored truck guards had misplaced the bag earlier that evening.
According to police officials, at the time they were contacted, the crew of the armored truck company were “out looking for where it was. They were pleased to get a call, and someone came and picked it up.”
The next day, someone from the Chase branch called Adams, who works as a janitor at a Chicago hospital, to tell him to whom the money belonged.
As of Thursday afternoon, Rolling Meadows officials were praising his honesty.
A police spokesman said, “He did the right thing, and he has a clear conscience. That’s refreshing.”
Two days later, Robert Adams was called to the police station and charged with making a false police report. Apparently, he lied about where he found the bag of cash. On his way home from work, he made a detour that he didn’t want his wife to know about – that’s when he found the bag of cash. In an effort not to be caught in lie by his wife, he told authorities he found it at a different bank.
He was released, but had to pay a $500 fine.
Officials said surveillance videos confirmed where Adams found the money.
