Couple’s Life Savings Retrieved From River
A National Guardsman pulled a heavy trunk containing $32,000 in silver coins and rolls of money from the flooded Cheat River, and the loot turned out to be an elderly couple’s savings.
“I just knew somebody would be happy when they got it back. That was all that mattered,” Sgt. Robert Lefler said Sunday.
Preston County sheriff’s deputies located the owners and returned the chest Thursday. The department declined to identify the couple, describing them only as elderly.
Lefler, 29, Sgt. Kenneth Stern, 26, and other National Guardsmen from nearby Camp Dawson were searching the muddy river banks in Preston County on Thursday for flood victims.
“Something in the water made me look, and I saw the tip of a box sticking up,” Lefler said. “I thought it was a kid’s toy box, but it had leather straps around it, so I pulled it up.”
Lefler, a lab technician from Pittsburgh, and Stern, an unemployed Summerset, Pa., resident, wrenched the heavy box out of several feet of muck and broke open a padlock.
Amid the coins, rolls of $2 bills and money bags, Lefler and Stern found a man’s name on a piece of paper.
Lefler said he never considered keeping the money. “There’s just so much destruction here, you don’t think of things like that.”
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