Travis Lee’s faith in humanity was restored Friday afternoon, Sept. 18 after a man from Walpole returned his wallet.
Lee, of Friendship, had just cashed his paycheck on Thursday and driven to Hannaford to pick up supplies for a tuna-fishing trip. While he was loading the groceries into the vehicle, he set his wallet on the roof of the car. He forgot to retrieve it before getting in the car and driving off to meet his girlfriend, Hilary O’Hara. It wasn’t until he got there that he realized the wallet had been lost.
Lee and O’Hara spent the next few hours walking the route Lee had driven in an attempt to find it, but their efforts turned up empty.
“I was so frustrated,” Lee said. “This was the first paycheck I had gotten in a while, and I felt I was letting down my family.”
Lee called Hannaford and the Damariscotta Police Department in hopes that someone had found the wallet, but neither had heard anything about it.
The following afternoon, Lee received a call from the police department saying the wallet had been found with all of the money still inside.
“I just felt so relieved, it was like a weight had been lifted,” Lee said.
Jesse Parker, of Walpole, said he was driving down Main Street when he saw the car in front of him run over an item in the middle of the road. Parker realized it was a wallet and pulled over to retrieve it.
Parker posted a note about the wallet on his Facebook page. He received a message from a friend saying her son worked at Hannaford and a man had stopped by earlier in the day saying he had lost his wallet.
After attempting to contact Lee through Facebook, Parker called the Damariscotta Police Department to let them know the wallet had been found. The police department reached out to Lee and set up a meeting between the two men Friday afternoon.
“I just feel so lucky,” Lee said. “There aren’t too many people who would go out of their way to do something like this.”
Parker said if he had been in the same situation as Lee, he would have wanted someone to do the same.
“It was the right thing to do,” Parker said.
