One good turn

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 3, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

True stories with happy endings are favorites of for the people. Here's one that happened close to home. Early this spring, INSIGHT executive assistant Donna Harkins lost her wallet while shopping at a COSTCO store in Arlington, Va. A telephone call to the store produced only a response that, "Sorry, no one's found anything like that." Repeated fine-toothed-comb searches of her car and a rerun of the route she'd followed after leaving the store turned up nothing.

A day passed, and Harkins steeled herself to the fact that the wallet, which had held a large amount of cash, seemed permanently and irretrievably lost. Even if someday the wallet turned up, she thought, the money certainly wouldn't. Someone would be sorely tempted--and give in to the temptation.

Then, the evening following the ill-fated event, there was a call from downstairs at Donna's apartment house. The caller, Khalid Moutei, 35, a taxi-driver from Morocco, held in his hand the lost wallet and asked if it was hers.

Moutei said he'd found it in the COSTCO parking lot and had gone to the address on the driver's license, only to find she recently had moved. But he noticed a change-of-address card and here he was, now, at Donna's new address. "Was the money still in it?" Donna asked. Moutei, who is a Muslim, said he didn't know and hadn't looked. His faith required him to return the wallet after he had found it, he said. Moutei, the father of a young daughter, seemed surprised that anyone would regard his honesty as in the least bit unusual.

The money was there, all of it, which prompted Donna to turn over a big tip. "I wanted to give it all to him," she says. "I was so impressed by what he'd done."

For the people is, too. Moutei's honesty confirms faith in basic human decency. This column tips its hat. When INSIGHT spoke with Moutei about his kind deed, he said: "It was my duty."