Family Runs Over Bag in Middle of Road, Opens It To Find $1 Million Inside
If you see cars ahead of you swerving while you’re driving, your anxiety shoots through the roof as you wait for the way to clear so you can see what’s going on and avoid any obstruction.
Sometimes it’s debris, sometimes it’s pieces of a blown tire, and on a bad day it’s some sort of critter dodging traffic.
When the Schantz family in Caroline County, Virginia, hit the road on Saturday, it wasn’t long before they hit something else, too.
Mom Emily Schantz, who was driving, saw the car in front of her swerve to avoid what looked like a bag of trash in the road. Schantz hit it and told WTVR-TV “it made a huge clunk noise.”
Apparently, the family thought it was garbage, but they stopped to pick it up — ostensibly so someone else wouldn’t hit it, too. They also found an identical bag about 15 feet away and threw both bags into the back of the truck.
When they later examined the contents of the “trash,” however, they were surprised to find treasure: around $1 million in cash.
“Inside of the bag, there were plastic baggies and they were addressed with something that said ‘vault,'” Schantz told the news outlet.
While it’s unclear how the cash found its way to the road, it couldn’t have been stumbled upon by a more honest person.
While many would have been very tempted to abscond with the money, Schantz, a teacher, decided to do the right thing and make use of the teachable moment with her sons.
“Do the right thing and return it,” she said. “Because it didn’t belong to us.”
When they realized what they’d stumbled upon, they called the authorities to turn over the find.
To Maj. Scott Moser of the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office, the good deed deserved recognition.
“They came back to Caroline, and found out they’d been riding around with almost a million dollars in the truck,” he said. “For someone so honest and willing to give that almost a million dollars back, it’s exceptional on their part.”
Moser also visited the Schantz home and put on a show for the two Schantz boys.
“Their two sons were there, so I put the lights on for them, but we are proud and they represented this county well by being so honest,” he said.
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