Bag stuffed with $50K in cash found San Francisco community garden

“How would someone misplace this money and not come looking for it?”

By Joel Umanzor
San Francisco Standard
Mar. 18, 2024

Excerpt:

Last month, a group of community garden workers unearthed a noirish mystery in the Inner Sunset—a duffel bag filled with wads of wet, disintegrating $100 bills wrapped in red napkins.

Volunteers with Garden for the Environment discovered the cash in the late morning on Feb. 28 while working in the garden. The bag of money was in a planter box underneath a row cover, which is used to protect crops growing in a plant bed, according to Maggie Marks, executive director of the garden.

“They thought it was a lot of money,” Marks said, “but I don’t think they realized how much there was. … The money was pretty stuck together.”

Volunteers sifted through what they could of the bills and estimated the total was around $50,000—although some of the bills had fused from being exposed to the elements, so the cash was difficult to count.

Then they phoned the police. “They came relatively quickly,” she said. According to Marks, about seven officers responded to the community garden’s call.

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