Unemployed, He Returns Lost Wallet--With $4,343

Matt Rayner has been unemployed since graduating from Cal State Northridge last May, but on Tuesday night he suddenly had enough money to pay for a hoped-for family vacation to Australia or a ski trip to Aspen.

The money--$4,343 of it--was in a wallet in a jacket that the 27-year-old economics major found in a parking lot in Sylmar. In addition to his own joblessness, he thought of his father, Henry, a construction engineer who also has been unemployed because of the building slump and a recent hernia operation.

And then he gave the money back.

Rayner left a message with the employer of the jacket’s owner that he had found the wallet and would hand it over to the police.

On Wednesday, Juan Quevedo Hernandez, a truck driver for a Van Nuys roofing distributor, gratefully picked up the wallet at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill station. After work, he dropped by Rayner’s house on Leach Street in Sylmar and gave him a $400 reward.

“Of course, I was tempted” to keep the cash, Rayner said Wednesday evening. “But I thought, how would you like the outcome to be if you were on the other end?”

The first thing Quevedo said to Rayner was “Thank you!” And the first thing Rayner asked Quevedo was “So, were you worried last night?”

Quevedo admitted he was.

Duane Martinez, a co-worker of Quevedo’s at All Roofing & Building Materials Corp. on Raymer Street, said he took the 8 a.m. call from Rayner saying he had Quevedo’s wallet. “I asked Juan if he lost a wallet, and he said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ He couldn’t believe that all the money was there,” Martinez said.

“Not too many people would do that.”