Two brothers clearing out their recently deceased grandmother's home in New York unwittingly donated a purse containing $39,000 in cash to a local thrift shop -- and they would never have known about it, had several employees at the shop not gone out of their way to track down the men and return the money.
DNAInfo reports Kindell Keyes, an assistant manager at the Goodwill store in Long Island City, found the envelopes of money inside the purse while sorting through donations last month.
Keyes, 51, of Far Rockaway, told the news website she thought someone was pranking her at first.
"I started looking around like, 'who's setting me up?' There's no way," she said.
She turned over the wad of cash to her manager, and she and other staff found a piece of mail left behind in the bag of donations. Goodwill retail director Maria Torres drove to the address, and neighbors there told her the homeowner had recently died, but gave her contact information for the woman's grandsons, who live in California.
One of them flew out to New York to collect the cash on Tuesday.
"I was shocked," one of the brothers, who asked only to be identified as Bryan, told DNAInfo.
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"It's just so good to know there's people like Kindell in the world. It's remarkable."
He said his grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and that she must have stashed the cash.
Meanwhile, Goodwill has rewarded Keyes for her good deed: it surprised her with a $3,9000 bonus, or 10 percent of the cash she found. Keyes said it never occurred to her to keep the money: "The money didn't belong to me. I believe in karma. You do good, good things happen to you."
