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TAYLORSVILLE — Two students at Taylorsville High School are being praised for returning a wallet filled with $2,700 in cash.
Jordan Cox said he spotted the large wallet sitting on a curb while walking to his car after school on Sept. 10. When he opened the wallet, he discovered it was packed with $100 and $50 bills.
Cox called over his friend Crosby Bringhurst and together they decided they should bring the wallet, which contained about $2,700 in cash, to the school's office.
"It was a lot of money," Bringhurst said. "We were just like, 'I can't imagine losing that.'"
When they brought it inside, a police officer told them a man was outside looking for his missing wallet. The wallet apparently fell out of the man's pocket while he was picking up his child up from the school. He was carrying the cash to pay for his family's rent.
The man came inside and thanked the students profusely for returning the wallet, giving them $100 each as a reward. School officials also said they were impressed.
"It would be pretty messed up to take someone's rent," Cox said. "I just wouldn't feel right about it."
The two students were recognized for their honesty at a Taylorsville City Council meeting Wednesday night. They were presented with Precinct Awards from the Unified Police Department's Taylorsville Precinct. They also received Jamba Juice gift cards.
Taylorsville principal Garett Muse said the students' actions demonstrate their character. He remembered an incident seven years ago where he witnessed a student pocketing a wallet that had just fallen out of another student's pocket. At the time, he said he questioned what the world was coming to because the student tried to argue that keeping the wallet wasn't stealing, but a matter of "finders keepers."
"Obviously the world hasn't come to that," Muse said. "We still have young people like this who will pick up a wallet and bring it right back into the school even though there are thousands of dollars in it."
Contributing: Mark Wetzel, Geoff Liesik, Nkoyo Iyamba
