BERKELEY (AP) — A California man found $1,300 in cash in what he thought was a box full of chicken wings from Domino’s, only to return the money and get free pizza for a year for doing the right thing.
Mike Vegas ordered Domino’s pepperoni and mushroom pizza and wings on Friday to enjoy on a rare day off from his two jobs. When the food arrived, the Berkeley man got a call to head into his job as a bar manager and stowed the food in the refrigerator.
Back at home at 5 a.m. Saturday after a long night, he opened one of the two cardboard wing boxes and found two thick stacks of cash.
“I was like, ‘what the heck,’” he said during a phone interview Monday.
Exhausted, he went to bed. The next morning he had text messages from a panicked delivery driver asking if he had the cash.
As it turned out, the driver had put the cash in an empty wing box on the way to the bank but accidentally delivered it with the pizza order, Vegas said.
Vegas said he has a 16-year-old daughter who had just asked him for cash for a car and he thought fate had come his way.
He took to Facebook to ask friends. Some said he should keep the cash.
“I could see there was deposit slips in there. I knew what had happened,” he said.
What’s more, he had delivered pizzas as a teen and could sympathize with the driver, he said.
He then took the money back to a nearby pizza shop.
Now it’s paying off with a year’s worth of free pizzas, says Domino’s Pizza General Manager Zia Mumtaz.