An 18-year-old from California is being praised after he returned a wallet containing $1,500 to its owner.
Tyler Opdyke had been handing out flyers to promote his uncle’s pest control business when he spotted the wallet, filled with $1,500 cash and several credit cards, outside Melissa Vang’s home.
The teenager told KOVR,“I just really thought about what I would want someone to do if I were to drop my wallet…And then I thought about the house. I thought about the family who lived there.”
Vang said her husband had dropped the wallet while making his way to the car.
A surveillance camera showed Opdyke knocked on Vang’s door and held the wallet up to a security camera outside her home.
When no one answered the door, Opdyke left the wallet under the doormat and walked away.
Vang was afraid to open her door to someone she didn’t know saying,“I don’t open my door to strangers, or anyone really that I don’t know or recognize. So after he walked away, I checked my camera.”
Opdyke later returned to see if the owner claimed the wallet. What he did not expect was the hug that followed from the owner.
He said, “I went back to go see if the money was still there because if it was, I was going to keep knocking. And that’s when Melissa and her two girls came out, and we hugged.”
Stories of people performing good deeds like this one are not unheard of. In 2015, a pharmacy owner in Albuquerque, New Mexico, returned a wallet containing $1,200 in cash to its owner two months after it was lost.