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 wanted to put it back in the couch and like re-find it in the morning when I can process it better." "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. Twenty minutes after sitting on an old, musky couch, three college students were now miraculously standing on $40,000 in cash. "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. “I would have bought my mom a new car,” Werkhoven said. Then around 11 a.m., Werkhoven’s mom called and told him that she found the woman’s name in the phone book. 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. “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. Before he died, he gave her money each week to put away for when he passed.
– 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.)