GILROY
– It wasn’t just the fact that a stranger returned Laura
Rasmussen’s stolen wallet and handheld computer to her, which he
said he found abandoned in a rest room at Home Depot.
GILROY – It wasn’t just the fact that a stranger returned Laura Rasmussen’s stolen wallet and handheld computer to her, which he said he found abandoned in a rest room at Home Depot.
While it was a great relief to get those things back, Rasmussen said, she was more impressed with the effort Richard – whose last name she never learned – said he took to track her down last Thursday and Friday.
“It’s really quite a heroic deed, as far as I’m concerned,” Rasmussen said.
It was Thursday, and Rasmussen was in Staples Office Superstore, next to Home Depot on San Ysidro Avenue, looking for a carrying bag for her new computer. As she checked out bags, she put her wallet in her shopping basket.
“I was walking away from the basket,” Rasmussen admitted.
Then she turned around, and the wallet was gone. She could only assume someone had swiped it.
The wallet contained Rasmussen’s new Palm Pilot handheld computer, worth about $400, as well as chips for the Palm Pilot worth about $100 each, several credit cards, identification cards and between $80 and $200 in cash.
The cash was the only thing she would not later get back. That, however, wasn’t her big concern. Nor were the credit cards, which she quickly canceled. What worried her most was the personal financial information stored on the mini computer, including her bank account numbers.
“The fear of having that out there was more troubling than anything else,” Rasmussen said.
Next door in the Home Depot rest room, Richard reportedly found the wallet and decided to return it to its owner. He first wandered the aisles of the huge hardware store, he later told Rasmussen, looking for a woman who matched the picture on her identification card. That didn’t work, so he called phone information for Palo Alto, where the card said Rasmussen lived. But the address on her card was an old one, and the phone company staff couldn’t give him a current phone number for her.
Richard also told Rasmussen he called her credit card companies, saying he had found her cards and wanted her phone number so he could return them. He again got nowhere.
“They left him on hold, for over 30 minutes in one case,” Rasmussen said. “That kind of bothered me, that my credit card companies didn’t want to help me get my (cards) back.”
All told, Rasmussen said, Richard said he spent “over an hour on his cell phone, using up his minutes, to find me.”
It was when Richard tried information in the Gilroy area that he found Rasmussen’s number at her home in San Martin. He called her Friday morning and drove her belongings out to her that evening, after he got off work.
Richard could not be reached for comment.
