Losing Sleep Over Found Money : Hawthorne: After discovering $9,685, man considers keeping it. But a restless night leads him to do the right thing: turn the money over to police.

For nine glorious hours, Nedal Setabouha dreamed about all the things he could do with $9,685 he found in a bag outside a Hawthorne bank.

The 21-year-old Hawthorne man, who works as a manager at Taco Bell, considered buying a new car, making a down payment on a house and planning a big wedding with his fiancee.

But as he lay awake in the middle of the night, he began to think of what his mother, who still lives in his native Jordan, would say if she knew he had kept the money. At about 2 a.m., he decided to do the right thing: He got out of bed and took the money to the police station.

“I was worried and couldn’t sleep,” Setabouha said. “When my mom raised me, she always told me: ‘Whatever you find, take it back. It isn’t yours.’ It’s not my money. I didn’t work for it. Why should I keep it?”

The bag, which had been carelessly deposited Tuesday in the night drop box at Bank of America, belonged to St. Joseph Parish School in Hawthorne, a private Catholic school with an enrollment of 540 children ages 6 to 13. The bag contained monthly tuition payments from more than 60 families, including $987 in cash.

“Thank you very much--can you take a hug?” Sister Cathy White, the school’s principal gushed Wednesday when Setabouha arrived for a visit.

Setabouha said the bag fell out of the box when he opened it to deposit receipts from Taco Bell. But instead of putting the money back in the night deposit box, he took the bag home--and began to fantasize.

When Setabouha realized that the checks were made out to a Catholic school, he began to feel guilty about having the bag around.

He later told police that his 5-year-old brother had opened the bag when he was out of the apartment. But in an interview Wednesday, he admitted that he was home when his brother, who is really a high school senior, opened the bag.

“I didn’t want to spend the night in jail,” Setabouha said. “I told the police my brother was 5 years old so nobody would blame him.”

White said she didn’t even know the bag was missing until Hawthorne police called her at 3 a.m. to tell her the money had been returned.

“We get a lot of crank calls, so when the officer asked for me by name, I said, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ ” White said.

She said she was so impressed by Setabouha’s honesty that she plans to stage a children’s play next month about the incident.

“You’re a good role model,” White told Setabouha before they parted. “There’s a lot of things they can learn about this. Thanks a bunch.”