A sharp-eyed Mexico City police officer saved the day for a distraught man who had left a fanny pack containing 30,000 pesos in a city washroom stall.

Officer Norberto Sánchez Hernández also may have indirectly helped save a life.

The owner of the pack told Sánchez he’d been carrying the large sum of money because he had been on his way to buy a badly needed oxygen tank for his wife, and he had been dreading going home empty-handed and without the money he had lost.

“He told me, ‘Officer, you won’t believe it, but you just saved my wife’s life because she needs that tank very much.”

Sánchez found the pack next to a toilet in a public restroom at a market in the Doctores neighborhood. After waiting a while with it at the market’s entrance, thinking someone would approach him about it, he got curious and opened the pack. What he saw concerned him.

Inside were boxes of medication, ID cards, a bank card and a bus card, 60 bills in 500-peso denominations. He also saw a tube he recognized immediately as part of an oxygen tank, something he was well familiar with.

“I personally had Covid-19,” he explained. “With treatment and isolation, I was able to recover. Currently, I’m on medication. At times I feel myself suffocating or I get tired, and my breathing fails me, but I have recovered.”

He approached a patrol car, asking to use its radio to call his precinct. Another officer arrived some minutes later, and the pair inspected the bag more carefully, finding a list of phone numbers.

They eventually reached the owner’s wife, who Sánchez says was coughing and having trouble breathing while she talked to him. After he explained his discovery, the woman confirmed that her husband had gone to Mexico City to buy an oxygen tank he had seen on the internet.

Once his wife called him, the owner — identified only as “Andrés”— came running to claim the pack. Sánchez returned it once he confirmed that the man could identify the pack’s contents.

Sánchez was recognized for his good deed on Police Chief Omar García Harfuch’s social media accounts, where he congratulated the officer. According to Sánchez, he will be receiving a promotion.

It is not the first time Sánchez has been recognized for his good work. He has been named Officer of the Month twice in his career, once in October 2019, when he stopped the attempted hijacking of a truck that contained 1.2 million pesos’ worth of cell phones — which also resulted in him receiving a promotion — and again in November of last year for chasing down a person he noticed assaulting two drivers stuck in a traffic jam.

Source: Milenio (sp)