Honest Finder Is Not a Keeper of $20,000 Cash

Carolyn Estes of Van Nuys found a surprise package in the garage for her apartment when she returned home after work Wednesday--a briefcase stuffed with more than $20,000 in cash.

“It was just sitting there,” she said. “All you had to do was pick the handle up and go off with it.”

But Estes did not abide by the finders-keepers philosophy. She quickly turned the case over to police, who late Wednesday afternoon said no one had come forward to prove that the money was his.

“I couldn’t think of doing anything else with it but turn it in to police,” said Estes, a 37-year-old nurse at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital. “It scared me to even see the case sitting there.”

If no one has claimed the money in 90 days, police said, it normally is given to the finder.

But Estes said she doesn’t think she would want it.

‘All Too Strange’

“It’s just all too strange,” she said. “The whole thing bothers me and makes me nervous. I was afraid to poke through it because I didn’t really want police to somehow think I was involved with this thing.”

Estes said she discovered the case about 12:30 a.m. It was standing upright on the white line separating her parking space from a neighbor’s space in the unsecured garage at her apartment complex in the 5300 block of Sepulveda Boulevard, she said.

She and a neighbor, who regularly watches for her when she comes home from work, took the maroon leather case to her apartment and began looking through it for identification.

“It had one of those combination locks at each end of it, but it looked like it had been pried open in the corner,” she said. “My friend put his hand inside and out came a bundle of $100 bills all stapled together.”

She said there were gasoline and other types of credit cards, foreign coins and what she believed to be welfare checks.

Police would not detail the contents of the case, other than to say it contained $20,632, mostly in $20, $50 and $100 bills. A police spokesman said investigators are checking into names written on the papers found inside the case.

Estes said she and her neighbor put the cash in a

green trash bag and called police.

Ten hours later, as she stood outside the apartments talking to reporters, a man emerged from the elevator behind her, listened for a moment, then stepped forward claiming the briefcase and money was his.

The man, who identified himself as Arthur Jenkins, 27, of Pacoima said he and his family were visiting his sister-in-law at the apartments and had inadvertently left the briefcase behind when they were loading their car. He said he went to retrieve the case from his car Wednesday morning, discovered it was missing and returned to the apartment complex to look for it.

He said he was carrying the cash to buy video equipment to sell at a Canoga Park shop he plans to open.

3 Bundles of Money

“I had $13,000 in one bundle, $6,000 in another bundle and $300 in another stack,” Jenkins said. “The money and paper work belong to the business.”

After about 10 minutes of questioning by reporters, Jenkins appeared nervous and left, saying he was going to “get some ID.”

Detective David Peery said a man named Jenkins called the police station Wednesday claiming the case belonged to him. But the man had not met with police by late afternoon.

“If this in fact is his money and we have it, why didn’t he come to the station?” Peery said. “If you honestly lost $20,000, where would you be this morning?”