They deserve an A+ in ethics.
A college kid and two pals found $40,000 stashed in their Salvation Army sofa — but instead of blowing it on pizza and kegs, they tracked down the original owner and gave it back.
SUNY New Paltz student Reese Werkhoven and roommates Cally Guasti and Lara Russo bought the “ugly, smelly” couch for $20, the blog Thelittlerebellion.com reported.
But the ratty, old fold-out furniture proved to be a secret treasure when Werkhoven first discovered a plastic envelope full of $700 stashed in it in March.
“I almost peed! The most money I’d ever found in a couch was like 50 cents. Honestly, I’d be ecstatic to find just $5 in a couch,” Werkhoven told the Web site.
Thrilled, he and his pals searched the whole couch — digging into every crevice — and found two more cash-stuffed envelopes, for a total of roughly $40,000.
After Russo spotted a woman’s name on one of the envelopes, the roommates had to decide whether to keep the cash or track down the person, Russo said.
“We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to . . . We didn’t earn it,” Russo said.
They dug up a phone number for the mystery woman and called her. She immediately replied, “Oh, I left a lot of money in that couch!” the blog reported.
After weighing the pros and cons — including the possibility that she might be a criminal — they drove to her rustic home in Hudson Valley.
There, a delighted widow told them the story behind her secret stash of cash.
Her husband, she said, had given her money each week to store in the sofa before he died of heart problems.
She kept it there for years but then was forced to undergo a heart operation.
While she was at a rehab facility, her daughter sold the sofa to make way for a bed, she said.
The beat-up old couch ended up at a Salvation Army store in New Paltz, where the students chose it because it fit the space in their apartment.
“We almost didn’t pick that couch. It’s pretty ugly and smells, but it was the only couch that fit the right dimensions for our living room,” Russo said.
The woman, a former florist who asked not to be named, gave the students $1,000 as a reward.
“When we handed the money back to the woman, she told us that she felt like her husband was present in the room with us,” Guasti said.
She added, “I could just tell right away that these were nice people.”