PRICELESS: Family Reunited With Camera, Memories Left at SFO

The following is a news release from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office:

It was indeed a Happy New Year for the Wong Family this week, when the family was reunited with several cameras of personal photos and over $200 in cash that they truly believed they would never see again.

It was near the end of May 2014, when the Wong Family was at the San Francisco International Airport. Mr. Wong and his wife were managing their two excited children and all the bags and luggage they had with them when somehow they left the airport without their camera bag in tow. Inside the bag were a HD video camera, a waterproof digital camera, as well as a larger Nikon digital camera, and just over two hundred dollars squirreled away in various pockets of the bag itself.

Unbeknownst to the Wong family, a good samaritan observed the bag had been left along a curb at the SFO International Terminal without anyone seeming to be associated with it. They brought that fact to the attention of airport staff who in turn, contacted the San Francisco Police Department; who is responsible for airport patrol activities. Finding no owner in sight, SFPD held onto the cameras for about two months, after which time, they turned the cameras over to Sheriff’s Office Property.

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office Property Bureau received the camera bag and its contents towards the end of July of last year. When the cameras continued to go unclaimed and a check of the serial numbers did not reveal any helpful information as to who the camera owners might be, the Property Bureau placed an ad in the San Mateo Times listing the cameras as found property. When the cameras still went unclaimed, it was arranged for them to be put up for auction just as is done with most found property that goes unclaimed for a length of time. As fate would have it however, the auction truck had mechanical issues and thus did not make its scheduled pick up. At that time Sheriff’s Office Property Manager Samantha Dal Porto had a nagging feeling that she could somehow reunite the owners with their property despite all the unsuccessful efforts to that point.

Property Manager Dal Porto subsequently looked through some of the photos on the camera and noticed the homes in the background of some of the pictures looked to possibly be located in South San Francisco or perhaps Daly City areas. In one picture in particular she noticed a school in the background and reached out to Fire Captain Paul Verducci of the Daly City Fire Department, who then positively identified the school in the picture as being a Daly City elementary school. After that, she emailed the school principal alerting him of her mission to find this family and as luck would have it the Principal knew just who the family was!

Mr. Wong was very happy and relieved to pick up his cameras and money from Sheriff’s Office Property. He was also extremely grateful to Sheriff’s Office Property Manager Samantha Dal Porto for locating him and his family and reuniting them with snap shots of memories he feared had been lost.