Students find $41,000 in Salvation Army sofa, return it to owner

It’s the classic dilemma: what would you do if you came across a hundred dollar note in the street: try to find its owner or stuff it in your pocket and walk away? Now imagine that you, a poor student, come across $41,000 in cash stuffed inside an old second hand sofa you’d just scrounged for, what would you do?

When SUNY New Paltz geology student Reese Werkhoven, and his two friends Cally Guasti and Lara Russo were trying out their new couch for the first time after purchasing it at a Salvation Army store, simply because it “fit the right dimensions” for the room, despite it being “pretty ugly”. It was a decision they certainly wouldn’t regret though when Werkhoven felt something in the arms of the sofa and pulled out an envelope stuffed with $20 bills adding up to $700.

Werkhoven stated that at that moment he was ecstatic, having never found more than fifty cents in a couch before. The trio then began a thorough search of the couch to see what other secrets it might be hiding, discovering multiple envelopes packed full with money, each adding up to $1000. After twenty minutes they were sitting on more than $40,000 in cash.

Immediately they began to plan what to do with the money, with ideas ranging from paying off student loans, to buying new cars for parents and travelling the world, until they came across an envelope that was named.

Russo stated: “We had a lot of moral discussions about the money. We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to…it’s their money – we didn’t earn it. However, there were a lot of grey areas.”

After discussing it into the middle of the night amongst themselves and their parents, they came to the decision to find the woman it belonged to and then they could decide whether she had earned it and deserved to have it back. Werkhoven’s mother found her in the phone book and the next day they phoned her to get the full story. The first thing they did was tell her about the purchase of the sofa from the Salvation Army, to which she replied: “Oh, I left a lot of money in that couch.”

That afternoon, they made the drive to her house, and handed the money back to the woman. She explained that her husband had dished out money to her each week to put away in the weeks before he died from a heart condition. She then continued to work as a florist, also saving up that money and stashing it in the sofa. The couch stuffed with cash remained in her home until she went for surgery on her back, and her daughter replaced it with a full sized, taking the old couch down to the Salvation Army, unknowing of the secret cash it held.

The woman, who remains anonymous, commented that she felt her husband was present in the room at the time the money was returned. In return for their good deed, Guasti, Russo and Werkhoven were presented with $1000 from the woman as a reward.

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