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Child finds a bag of money and gives it back Mail Tribune / Roy Musitelli When Petra Noble, 10, found $13,000 in a shopping cart last weekend, she didn't even dream of keeping the money because she knew it must belong to someone. Her honesty was rewarded with cash and her mom's thanks for a wonderful Mother's Day gift - knowing that her daughter did the right thing. By BILL KETTLER Mail Tribune Petra Noble's keen eye saved Miranda Gomez-Castro from a $13,000 headache. Gomez-Castro drove away from Medford's Stewart Avenue Foodland Sunday and left behind a bank bag full of cash in a shopping cart. The bag held two weeks worth of sales from his store in Phoenix, La Estrella. That would have been bad enough, but there was also money in the bag that wasn't his. Gomez-Castro cashes checks for workers who don't have bank accounts and sends the money back to their families in Mexico. Gomez-Castro raced back to the store when he realized he'd forgotten the money, but the bag was gone. "I almost had a heart attack," Gomez-Castro said. "I felt pretty bad. I wondered what I was going to say to all those people. I'd have to pay them. I would be the responsible person." Petra noticed the bag when she and her mom, Sandi, dropped in to do some shopping to make burritos. "I thought, 'Cool, I found a money bag,' " the 10-year-old Medford girl said. She and her mom thought about taking the bag to a store manager until they opened it and saw a thick bundle of 20s, 50s, and 100s. "We knew we weren't going to just give it to Foodland," Petra said. "We just knew it belonged to someone," her mom said. "We wanted to make sure it got back to them." They took the bag home and called Medford police. "It was more money than I'd ever seen," said Petra's dad, Laryl Noble. "There was one hundred after another. I thought, 'This is unreal.' " Not long after the Nobles called police, Gomez-Castro reported the missing money. He described the same bag the Nobles were holding, and police sent him to the Noble's home. When Gomez-Castro came to claim the bag, he reached inside and gave Petra two hundred-dollar bills. "That was so nice of her and her parents to report that bag," he said. "I wanted to do something for other kids to see that's it's right to return something you've found." "I was about ready to cry," said Petra, a fifth-grade student at Grace Christian School. "She was shrieking and jumping up and down when he gave her that money," Laryl Noble said. Petra plans to save some of the money, give some to a church group that sponsors missionaries, use some for spending money during the family's summer vacation, and maybe do a little shopping. "I'm a girl," she said. It's just natural to want to go shopping." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.