VANCOUVER — Two Vancouver cab company employees say they were just doing their jobs when the reunited a California couple with $400,000 worth of jewelry they had inadvertently left behind in a taxi.
Retired banker Bill Snelling and his wife Phyllis took a cab to the Vancouver International Airport on their way back to California after an Alaskan cruise.
They later realized they were missing a key piece of luggage — a backpack containing about $400,000 worth of jewelry, which Phyllis had brought to wear during some events on the cruise.
While the couple reported the missing backpack — and its valuable contents to the police — the cab company workers knew only that a piece of luggage was missing.
John Kahsay, who has worked in the dispatch room for Black Top Cabs for 17 years, swung into action when he heard that two customers had lost a piece of luggage in one of the fleet’s vans.
He went into the data system to find out which vans had gone to the airport during the period that the Snellings were dropped off.
Narrowing it down to nine or 10 vans, he asked all the drivers where they had picked up their airport-bound passengers, and came up with Jai Kirpal, the Snellings’ driver the day before.
Kirpal noticed the pack behind his seat Saturday evening at the end of his shift.
“When I looked back, I see the bag,” he said. “I don’t like to open somebody else’s stuff.”
The bag and its payload had been in the back of the cab all day.
On Sunday morning, Kirpal got a call from Kahsay, and it became clear that the bag he had was the missing one.
The Snellings flew back to retrieve it the next day.
Kahsay and Kirpal will split a $2,000 reward for tracking down the backpack.
“I’ve never got his kind of prize for doing my job,” said Kahsay, who plans to use the money to visit family in Toronto.
Phyllis Snelling described the men as “wonderful, honest and supportive.”
She said the contents of the bag were just as they were when it was packed.
“It’s important as a society that there are people willing to do the right thing,” she said.
Vancouver Sun
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