Return to sender

Ask many people these days, and they’ll say times are tough.

Prices are up for food and gas, jobs are being cut, and the country’s financial powerhouses are folding left and right. Many people live paycheck to paycheck.

So, what would you do if you found $1,000 on the ground with no one in sight to claim it?

David Ostrea, a mail carrier in Newport Beach for 20 years, answered that question in August.

“As I was pulling away, I noticed a letter lying on the dirt road right there,” Ostrea said. “A lot of times letters that are outgoing will fall off the mailbox and blow away, so I pulled back over to the side and picked it up.”

What Ostrea found wasn’t a letter, but an envelope stuffed with 10 $100 bills.

“I just picked it up, and there were no markings, no stamp, nothing,” he said. “Boy, this is a lot of money. A lot of money. My first thought was, ‘What do I do with it?’”

What Ostrea did may seem unexpected for a man who admittedly lives paycheck to paycheck, paying the rent and helping to support a wife and three kids.

“As tight as times are right now, it’d be difficult to turn away $1,000 like that,” Ostrea said. “I’m a Christian, it’s my belief. I serve the Lord Jesus before I serve anything else. It’s a matter of doing what is right. In times, in days like they are now, everybody’s for themselves. But it comes down to who you serve determines who you are.”

The envelope was next to a parked car on the street. Ostrea left a note on the car instructing the owner that if they lost “something,” they should call him. Hours after Ostrea turned in the envelope to authorities, he received a phone call from Trina Cittel’s daughter. It was Cittel’s money, she told police.

Cittel had received the money shortly before she lost it and was using it to help pay for a cruise to celebrate her and her husband’s 20th anniversary. Police could describe her only as “ecstatic” regarding Ostrea’s good deed, even offering him a reward.

“There’s no reward necessary,” Ostrea said. “I know I’m going to get my reward in heaven. My reward waits for me there. When you do things like that, when you do things that are right, [the Bible] says your treasures are sent ahead of you.”

Ostrea, who was on that route only because a co-worker had called in sick, didn’t tell anyone what he had done — the police notified his bosses.

In a letter sent to Ostrea’s supervisors, Newport Beach Police Chief John Klein commended Ostrea for his “honesty, professionalism and dedication to his duty as a postal carrier.”

Ostrea chuckles and says he was just doing his job.

“You take a look at money like that, people say ‘finders keepers losers weepers,’ but I know that money belonged to somebody,” he said. “It could’ve been an old lady’s rent money. It just made me feel better that the money got back to who it belonged to. In the world’s eyes it might be hard to do. But you know, when you know where your heart belongs, it’s easy. It’s easy to do what’s right.”