text: It was an ethical dilemma straight from the textbooks: Imagine you and two of your friends find a small fortune of cash inside a crummy old couch you bought for cheap at a second-hand shop. Would you trace the money back to its owner, or would you keep it to spend on your heart’s deepest desires? A SUNY New Paltz student and two friends dealt with this dilemma firsthand early March 2014. 
   
   Third-year geology student Reese Werkhoven, Mount Holyoke College graduate Cally Guasti, and SUNY New Paltz graduate Lara Russo were getting cozy on their new couch for the first time when Werkhoven found a plastic envelope under the couch’s patchy arm. 
   
   “I almost peed,” Werkhoven said. Inside the envelope was a wad of twenties that added up to $700. 
   
   “The most money I’d ever found in a couch was like fifty cents. Honestly, I’d be ecstatic to find just $5 in a couch.” 
   
   The group began a thorough excavation, maneuvering the couch in all directions so that every linty crevice could be probed to find more money. 
   
   “Just when we thought we pulled out the last envelope we’d find another $1,000 a few minutes later,” said Guasti. 
   
   Twenty minutes after sitting on an old, musky couch, three college students were now miraculously standing on $40,000 in cash. 
   
   For a while, there were no notes, no names, or anything else that could have told them who the money belonged to. For all they knew the money was fair game. 
   
   ~ 
   
   Then there was a game changer. Russo found a woman’s name on one of the envelopes. 
   
   “We had a lot of moral discussions about the money,” Russo said. “We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to… it’s their money– we didn’t earn it. However, there were a lot of gray areas we had to consider.” 
   
   Each of them called their parents for advice;. Their parents basically told them all the same thing: 
   
   Don’t spend the money. Don’t tell anyone about the money. Find the woman from the envelope. Find out if it’s her money. 
   
   Questions came into focus. 
   
   What if the money had belonged to a homicidal drug dealer? What if it was all counterfeit? What if the person who owned the money was dead? Who should they trust to give it to in their name? What if the person is just a really bad person? 
   
   Russo pondered the last question on the phone with her mother. “My mom said that I have a good moral compass, and if I don’t think that someone is a good person, or deserving of the money, then I’m not obligated to give it to them. This really threw me off. Where do you draw the line? It’s all very subjective.” 
   
   The possibilities were endless and the group seemingly discussed them all that night. Though they weren’t banking on it, there was still a chance they’d be able to keep some or all of the money. 
   
   “I would have bought my mom a new car,” Werkhoven said. “What she drives is a piece of junk, and I really wanted to surprise her with a brand-new car.” 
   
   Other items high on the wish lists: paying back student loans and traveling the world. 
   
   Keeping the big secret 
   
   The next morning, Russo and Guasti were at work, Werkhoven was at class, and all of them had a huge secret they couldn’t share with anyone. 
   
   Then around 11 a.m., Werkhoven’s mom called and told him that she found the woman’s name in the phone book. After work Werkhoven gave the woman a call. 
   
   He asked the woman her name and told her he had just bought a couch from Salvation Army. 
   
   She immediately replied, “Oh, I left a lot of money in that couch.” 
   
   Werkhoven promised her that he and his housemates would be able to return the money at any time, but he was a little taken aback by her shortness with him on the phone. 
   
   Returning the money 
   
   In the late afternoon, Werkhoven, Guasti and Russo were in the car headed to the woman’s house in the Hudson Valley. 
   
   “About halfway to her house we stopped the car and had a serious discussion…what if she’s a really bad person? What can we do at this point if we meet her and decide we don’t want to give her the money?” 
   
   Not having a plan of exit, they rolled up the long driveway past three “beware of dog” signs and several mounted cameras. 
   
   It was a rustic home in a rough neighborhood. The porch was grey and chipping paint. The front door creaked open slowly, Werkhoven remembered. 
   
   “I think the part of this whole experience that cleared away my prior thoughts and worries was when I saw the woman’s daughter and granddaughter greet us at the door,” Werkhoven said. “I could just tell right away that these were nice people.” 
   
   “When we handed the money back to the woman, she told us that she felt like her husband was present in the room with us,” Guasti said. 
   
   In an interview, the woman, who asked not to be identified, explained how her money was lost. 
   
   Her husband had had a heart condition and knew his time was limited. Before he died, he gave her money each week to put away for when he passed. For 30 years she stored her savings inside an old couch in the television room where she slept. When her husband passed away, she remained working as a florist and continued to store her money in the couch until she had an operation on her back and went to a rehabilitation center for several months. 
   
   Upon the doctor’s advice, the woman’s daughter and son-in-law replaced the couch she slept on with a full-size bed. 
   
   The couch ended up at the Salvation Army store in New Paltz and was bought for $20 by three genuinely good young people who had the strength and wherewithal to make a commendable moral decision. 
   
   “We almost didn’t pick that couch,” Russo said. “It’s pretty ugly and smells, but it was the only couch that fit the right dimensions for our living room.” 
   
   The woman gave $1,000 to Guasti, Russo and Werkhoven as a reward for returning the $40,000. ||||| NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (AP) — For all the screaming and carrying on, their neighbors thought they'd won the lottery. But it was a lumpy old sofa stuffed with $40,000 in cash that had three young roommates raising a ruckus. 
   
   From left, Lara Russo, Cally Guasti and Reese Werkhoven sit on a couch in their apartment in New Paltz, N.Y. on Thursday, May 15, 2014. The roommates had purchased it at a Salvation Army store and found... (Associated Press) 
   
   Lara Russo, left, Cally Guasti, center, and Reese Werkhoven sit on a couch in their apartment in New Paltz, N.Y. on Thursday, May 15, 2014. The roommates had purchased it at a Salvation Army store and... (Associated Press) 
   
   And here's the other side of the ticket: They returned the money to the 91-year-old widow whose couch had been given away. 
   
   "We just pulled out envelopes and envelopes," said Cally Guasti, a social worker with Family of Woodstock who shares an apartment with two friends in New Paltz, 75 miles north of New York City. "My mouth was literally hanging open — everybody's was — it was an unfathomable amount." 
   
   Guasti told The Associated Press on Thursday that she and her friends had bought the beat-up couch and a chair for $55 at a Salvation Army thrift shop in March. They noticed the arm cushions were weirdly lumpy. Then, one night in April, one of them, State University of New York at New Paltz student Reese Werkhoven, opened a zipper on one arm and found an envelope. 
   
   It contained $4,000 in bubble-wrapped bills. 
   
   Guasti, Werkhoven and roommate Lara Russo opened the other arm zipper and started mining the treasure stashed inside. They counted it up: $40,800. 
   
   "Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed," Russo said. "I wanted to put it back in the couch and like re-find it in the morning when I can process it better." 
   
   Gausti said they spread the money on the bed and started counting. 
   
   "And we were screaming," she said "In the morning, our neighbors were like, 'We thought you won the lottery.'" 
   
   Mixed in with the cash was a deposit slip with a woman's name on it. Werkhoven called her the next morning. 
   
   "She said, 'I have a lot of money in that couch and I really need it,'" Guasti said. 
   
   They drove to the home of the woman, who turned out to be the elderly woman. She cried in gratitude when they gave her the cash she had hidden away. 
   
   The woman's family had donated the couch to the Salvation Army while she was having health problems. 
   
   "It's not our money, said Werkhoven, of New York City. "We didn't have any right to it." 
   
   Guasti said the cash simply wasn't theirs. "I think if any of us had used it, it would have felt really wrong."
target: – A 91-year-old widow in New York state has been reunited with her life savings thanks to the honesty of three young roommates who found the cash in a beat-up sofa they bought from the Salvation Army. Months after buying the couch, the trio were astonished to discover $40,000 stashed in the arm cushions, the AP reports. After finding a name written on an envelope, they contacted the sofa's former owner and discovered she had stored her savings in it for more than 30 years. While the elderly woman was in hospital after an operation on her back, her daughter unknowingly got rid of the couch her mother slept on and replaced it with a full-sized bed. After the find, "we had a lot of moral discussions about the money," one of the roommates tells Little Rebellion. "We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to. It's their money—we didn’t earn it." They say that after they handed the money back, she cried in gratitude, and rewarded them with $1,000. (A homeless man recently did something similar—for a second time.)