Lost & Found: 30 Days to Claim Keys; 60 Days for Prosthetic Leg or Cell Phones

The Lost & Found department here looks like a Goodwill store. There are three shelves of items, including 33 handbags, bins of keys and wallets and three trash cans full of umbrellas.

The valuable items - jewelry and cash – are locked in a safe. Other items – guns, knives, eyeglasses and medicines – are turned over to the METRO Police Department (MPD).

A new-in-box DVD player sits on a top shelf. Assorted jackets and blouses hang on a rack; a cowboy hat sits jauntily on a stack of caps.

Welcome to METRO’s Lost & Found department, located in the RideStore at 1900 Main St. This is where you go to claim anything you lose on the bus or train.

Every day, bus drivers do a sweep at the end of their run, collecting lost items and turning them into to someone called a Car Starter, the liaison who gives a daily packet with assignments to the drivers. The next day, a courier picks up all the items and delivers them to the Lost & Found Department which sorts, tags and logs the items.

“We have three reps working in the Lost and Found department who will go through the packages and make sure every item turned in is listed in the manifest. We check everything off for verification,” says Cindy Brandt, supervisor of RideStores and Lost and Found.

Items are held for 30 days unless they are valuable – and those are held for 60 days. Valuable items would include cell phones, wallets with money, jewelry, laptops, Blackberries – and oh, yes, that prosthetic leg that was left behind. Some things are not saved, such as food or the Igloo container of urine samples found recently. 

Then it’s time for the staff to become sleuths. 

“We work very hard to make sure customers get their items,” says Brandt. “We do everything we can to try to locate them. A lot of times, we’ll receive wallets with large amounts of money but they don’t have contact numbers in there, but we’ll see a business card. We’ll call and contact the person and ask, ‘Do you know this person?’ And pretty much be incognito.”

The Lost & Found Department keeps cell phone chargers on hand and routinely charges lost cell phones – then dials any numbers on speed dial or anyone named Mom in the phone directory.

From January 2006 to January 2007, 4,923 items were turned in and  3,725 picked up – a 76 percent rate of return. On the left is a photo of Virginia Hickey, lead customer information specialist, holding a knife and dumbbell.

Brandt says METRO once returned $3,200 to its rightful owner. It’s not unusual to find $200 cash that was left behind in a wallet. “We’ve had people who were flying out of the country. Once someone was flying to Mexico – and we were able to get hold of this gentleman. He had important identification papers he had left,” recalled Brandt.

Many times the elderly forget items. Kim Wells, customer service manager, recalls the time an elderly woman had cashed her Social Security check and then left all the cash on the bus. It was all the woman had to live on for the month.

Wells was able to track down the woman, return the money and convince her to get her checks directly deposited into a bank account.

“It was really special of a customer who found the money to turn that in. We couldn’t believe someone turned that in – it was around $1,200,” said Wells.

Last week, a customer claimed a trash bag he had left behind. In it were cowboy boots, X-rated videos and a new showerhead.

Items not picked up are donated to charity.

If you lose an item, call 713/658.0854. Give the rep as much information as possible, including when it was lost and on which bus route, and your contact information.

Here are photos of our hard-working Lost & Found reps:

Kristian Pipkins

JoMarie Castaneda

Yinka Omotunwashe