A Postal Service employee received praise recently after reuniting a customer with $5,000 in missing cash.
The customer, Don Wells, a retiree, had withdrawn the money from a bank and placed it in a deposit envelope, then accidentally mailed it with several letters and bills. The bank envelope had no name or address on it.
Hoping against hope, Wells’ family contacted a USPS Customer Care Center, which issued an alert that caught the eye of John Marrinan, a Melville, NY, mail processing clerk.
“I put a sticker on my desk to remind me to look for it every time I came in to work,” Marrinan said.
The bank envelope bounced between several plants in New York before it finally landed at the Mid-Island Processing and Distribution Center, where Marrinan works.
By chance, Marrinan noticed a hamper filled with mail destined for recycling and decided to search it for errant First-Class Mail letters.
“So I go through a whole hamper with 20 or 30 trays in it. As I got to the bottom, I found one of those deposit envelopes the bank gives you. There were 50 $100 bills inside,” Marrinan said.
Wells reportedly cried when a USPS customer service representative called to say his money was found.
“It was satisfying because the customer was a senior citizen and it renewed his faith in people,” Marrinan said.
Wells told Lori Ann Granholm, a business service network representative who helped return the money to him, that Marrinan’s honesty and diligence had “enforced his faith in humanity.”