Finder, but Not Keeper

Worth far more than the $250 that Jamie Fox was sure she’d never see again was the lesson she learned from the 6-year-old boy who found and returned her wallet.

Fox, a 13-year resident of West Hills, said that through the years she had grown suspicious of her neighbors in the San Fernando Valley, many of them immigrants.

“I was beginning to think everyone in Los Angeles was a criminal,” Fox said.

That was until she met Leslie Lazar, a first-grader who immigrated to the United States from Hungary a year ago with his mother.

Fox had just withdrawn $200 from an automated teller machine Sunday at Fallbrook Mall in West Hills when, minutes later, she reached for her wallet in a store and realized it was missing.

Although she reported the loss to mall security, she said she assumed that the money, which she planned to use to pay a veterinary bill for her sick cat, was gone forever.

“I just went home and cried,” she said.

Meanwhile, Leslie and his mother were busy in their Reseda Boulevard apartment trying to find the owner of the cash-filled wallet that Leslie had found on the ground during an excursion to the mall.

“Mommy, look at what I found,” Helen Valentini quoted her son as saying. “We have to give it back.”

A single mom, Valentini conceded that it occurred to her that $250 would have greatly eased a tight monthly budget, “but we are not that way,” she said.

A couple of hours later, after finding Fox’s telephone number on an insurance card in the wallet, Valentini called Fox and told her about her son’s discovery.

Fox gave Valentini and her son a $100 reward for their honesty.

“They could have used that money,” she said. “They didn’t have to give it back.”

More importantly, Fox said, the incident forced her to reexamine some of the attitudes she was surprised to learn she had developed.

“I’m just not going to be so quick to assume that people who are less fortunate than me are thieves,” she said. “I just shouldn’t be slamming people.”

There was another lesson, too. Fox said, while there was a time when she might have given a second thought to returning a cash windfall, there would be no such hesitation now.

“What goes around, comes around,” she said. “You can be sure if I ever find somebody’s wallet, I’ll return every penny.”

Besides the cash reward, Fox gave Leslie one of her prized Beanie Baby dolls on Thursday, to which the shy boy responded with an ear-to-ear grin. Leslie will also be acknowledged for his good deed during an assembly today at Blythe Street Elementary School, and City Councilwoman Laura Chick is planning to honor him with a City Council resolution.

“Often people think ‘finders, keepers,’ ” Chick said. “Here’s a 6-year-old boy who knows better than that.”

Boy returns lost wallet with $250 cash inside. Owner gives him $100, toy. He is to be honored with a City Council resolution and at school assembly.