Two recently graduated youth ministers on their way to Catholic Mass on Thursday morning had a test of faith when they discovered banded stacks of $100 bills in the middle of a street.
The $31,000 would help pay off their student loans, and they could send it to needy friends or hurricane victims in Louisiana, reasoned Daniel Morrone, 23, and Shannon Gunning, 22.
But after Gunning carried the 5-inch-thick bundles of cash in her purse to Mass, she and Morrone concluded there was only one thing they could do in good conscience. They took it to the Littleton Police Department.
“Go figure,” Gunning said. “It’s like a Christian movie.”
Khoa Nguyen, 19, said he was elated by their decision. He was worried sick about losing the money his parents had given him that morning.
It was his Vietnamese parents’ life savings, he said. In the 12 years since they moved from Vietnam, his father had worked as a handyman at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church in Centennial and his mother had worked at fast-food restaurants and a nail salon. They gave him $50,000 to pay for his schooling and living expenses.
His father told him to immediately deposit the money in his bank account, Nguyen said.
His arms loaded with schoolbooks, Nguyen had set the money – bound with rubber bands in $10,000 stacks – on the roof of his car. When he arrived at his bank the money was gone, said Sean Dugan, Littleton police spokesman.
“I was scared,” Nguyen said. “I had no clue where the money was.”
Morrone, a youth minister in Panama City, Fla., was riding in a car to at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Littleton with his college friend from at Franciscan University in Ohio when they spotted the money in the middle of West Mineral Avenue near the South Platte River, he said.
“We were about to drive by it because it looked like paper at first,” Morrone said. “But then we realized it was money.”
They were the first of about 12 people to park in the middle of the road. They took stacks of money back to their car as other people – some laughing – began chasing $100 bills flying through the air.
Dugan said $19,000 is still missing. Only Gunning and Morrone brought money to the station. People can return the money they found with no questions asked, he said. It is a crime to keep it, he said.
The two youth ministers were excited about finding an amount equal to a year’s salary. They speculated that the money could have been dropped by an armored car or by drug dealers during a police chase. They could spend it on good causes, they thought.
“We had our whole lives planned out,” Gunning said. “I was a little bit distracted at Mass to say the least. Nobody would have ever known.”
At church, Gunning said she thought about how it had only been months since her graduation from a Catholic university and weeks since she was hired as an assistant youth minister.
“That’s what got to both of us,” Gunning said. “If we wanted to be teaching teens the Gospel, we needed to be doing it ourselves.”
Ten minutes before the ministers arrived at the station, police told Nguyen there was a 99.9 percent chance he would never see his money, Morrone said.
Then the officer told the ministers how Nguyen’s parents had given their savings so their only son could have a better life.
Nguyen said he will use the money to pursue a math degree at Colorado Community College in Denver. What the ministers did is so unusual, he said.
“I was very very grateful.”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
