A local waitress returned more than $1,000 cash to a customer who left it on a table she had waited on.
“(It was) a bunch of $100 bills and a couple of $20 in, like, a bank envelope,” said Tricia Ayers, a waitress at Walt's Barbecue. “I though that was crazy somebody left that here."
Ayers returned the bank envelope containing $1,200 to a very happy Fred Smith, who thought his money for Christmas presents was gone forever.
Smith, of Batavia, said he met his daughter and her husband for his first dinner at Walt's on Colerain Avenue on Saturday before Christmas, but it wasn't until he went to work two days later that he realized his money was missing.
“I grabbed my jacket, the money was gone and I panicked. I didn't know what to do,” Smith said. “I (thought), 'I got to suck this up. It's gone. There's no way I'll ever get the money back. Maybe I dropped it or it fell in a parking lot.' I just went nuts.”
For the next several days, Smith said he called and checked the places he had been to with no luck, until he called Walt's and was told that Ayers had immediately turned the money in with no thought of keeping it.
“I had no thought of that. I just know how it is. I couldn't imagine if that happened to me. (I) so hope to God somebody honest would give it back to me,” Ayers said.
“It's nice to know there are still honest people in this world. (It's) great she did this. I wish I was a millionaire; I would give her a million bucks,” Smith said.
