Family finds $45,000 in new home — then returns it
SALT LAKE CITY - When Josh Ferrin closed the first home of his family, never thought she would make the discovery of his life - then give it back.
Ferrin picked up the keys earlier this week and decided to check out the house in the Salt Lake City suburb of Bountiful. He was excited to finally have a place his family could call their own.
Walking toward the garage, a piece of cloth clinging to a door in the attic caught his attention. He opened the hatch and climbed the stairs, then pulled out a metal box that looked like a case of World War II munitions.
"I panicked, locked my car and called my wife to tell her that she could not believe what I found," said Ferrin, who works as an artist for the Deseret News of Salt Lake City.
Then they found seven more boxes, all full of the wound rolls of cash together with a rope - more than $ 40,000.
Ferrin quickly took boxes home from her parents to tell. Along with his wife and children, extending thousands of bills on a table, separating the packages one by one.
They stopped counting at $ 40,000, but estimated it was at least $ 5,000 more on the table.
Ferrin thinking about how a large sum of money that could go a long way, paying bills, buying things you never thought you could afford.
"I'm not perfect, and I wish I could say there was never any doubt in my mind. We knew we had to turn away, but does not mean he did not think our car in need of repairs, how we would like to adopt a child and are not able to do that now, or fix our house you just bought obsolete, "said Ferrin. "But money was not ours to keep I do not think you have the opportunity many times to do something radically honest, to do something ridiculous impressive for someone else and that is a lesson that I hope to teach my children."
He thought the house's previous owner, Arnold Bangerter, who died in November and left the house to their children.
"I could imagine in his workshop. From time to time carefully tied up to $ 100 with a rope, climb into your attic and put in a storage box. And he did for me," Ferrin said the man who had worked as a biologist with the Utah Department of Fish and Game.
Bangerter bought the house in 1966 and lived there with his wife, who died in 2005.
After most of the money was counted, Ferrin called one of Bangerter children with the news.
Kay Bangerter said he knew that his father hid the money, because once found a pile of cash recorded under a drawer in his house, but never considered that his father had put away so much over the years .
"He grew up in difficult times and the people who survived that era had nothing when they came out of it unless he put it," said Kay Bangerter, the eldest of six children, the Deseret News. "It was a protector, not an investor."
Bangerter called money back, "a story that will outlive our generation and yours, probably."
"I am a father, and I worry about the future of my children," said Ferrin. "I can see how to put money for a rainy day and would have been a mistake on my part, denied that he worked for years. I felt I got to write a chapter in his life, a chapter that was not 't able to end and see through to its conclusion. "
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