Woman Gets Thanks, With Interest

The big bag of money was just lying in the bank’s parking lot where the armored truck guard dropped it.

When Michelene Titus spotted the white canvas bag next to her car, she ran in to the U.S. Bank’s Kelso branch and told a teller, she said.

The Longview woman says she didn’t get so much as a “thank you.”

“A thank you is all I really expected,” Titus said.

The bag was “at least three-quarters full,” she said. She left her mother and daughter to guard the loot while she went into the bank to tell someone what she had found.

“I think the teller thought I was there to rob the bank,” Titus said, describing how she walked to the front of a long line of customers and told the teller to come with her, immediately.

When the teller saw the bag, she picked it up, swearing, and ran back into the bank, Titus said.

“I called the bank later and said, ‘You know, I really got to thinking about it and I don’t think it was very nice that nobody thanked me,”’ she said.

“Then they called back last night and said ‘thank you’ over and over and over,” and gave her a gift certificate to any restaurant she wanted, Titus said.

Titus said she didn’t think about running off with the cash “even for a second. I’m just the type who believes if you do something wrong you’re going to pay for it.”