'What are the chances?' Mason man's wallet returned in NYC

Jason Hutchison, a salesman from Mason, was traveling on business in downtown Manhattan on Monday when he got out of a cab around 10:45 a.m., and left his wallet behind on the cab's seat.

When he realized his wallet was missing about 90 minutes later, he tried not to panic.

The wallet had his cash, identification, credit cards and even a Social Security card. He called the cab company, but no luck.

“How am I going to get home? How am I going to get on an airplane?” he worried. He decided to put it aside for a day and focus on business he was there to conduct at his office’s headquarters, Cognical, an e-retail leasing company.

Hutchison said he pulled out the wallet to pay for the cab. When he signed the receipt, he put that in his front pocket, and forgot to put the wallet away.

The wallet was lost in hard-boiled New York City. Fat chance of seeing that again.

In the meantime, the cab driver picked up three other passengers. The fourth was Laura Boyd, a boudoir photographer, who spotted the wallet on the back seat.
It was black leather on a black seat and hard to see.

Boyd opened the wallet and saw the cash and credit cards. She decided to try to find Hutchison and return the wallet.

“I just would want someone to do it for me. It’s such a bummer to lose such important stuff. I was going to mail it to him if I couldn’t get in touch with him,” she said.

She called one of his credit card companies but they said they couldn’t contact Hutchison.

So she turned to Facebook.

An 11-year resident of New York City but originally from South Carolina, she had no strong connections to Michigan, except some Facebook friends whom she met on a Cooking Light group.

She tried to message Hutchison, but since they weren’t friends on Facebook she thought it would be unlikely he would see the private message.

So she posted at 1 p.m.: “Found some dude's wallet in my cab today... and cannot find him. Even tried calling his bank but they say they cannot even call him for me to tell him I found his wallet. If anyone here knows Jason Hutchison from Mason MI who is visiting NYC, I have his wallet.”

Soon her post was being posted and reposted, nearly 1,400 shares in all.

About a half hour after he discovered his wallet missing, shortly after 1 p.m., Hutchison got a strange call from his best friend Cory Hummel in Mason. Hummel never contacts him during work hours so Hutchison was puzzled.

“He says, exactly like this. ‘Dude did you lose your wallet? And I’m like ‘Whoa. How did you know this?’ That freaked me out,” he said.

Hummel’s wife, Mindy, saw the post on Facebook and called Cory. Hutchison found Boyd’s private message and called her.

Amazingly, in such a big city, the two were only 10 blocks apart.

“I called her immediately. She said 'Jason, I have your wallet,’” he recalled Tuesday. “Money, credit cards. She had my whole life in her hands.”

Just after 3 p.m. Hutchison went to the Boyd’s photo studio, Rue Boudoir, and picked up his wallet. The two took a “selfie” and posted it on Facebook.

He’s glad she didn’t turn it over the cab company.

“I believe I had a trustworthy cabbie, but that is not the norm. The norm is you’ll never see your wallet again,” he said.

He said he will stay in touch with Boyd, whom he called his newest best friend in New York.

New York has 8 million people. "What are the chances of somebody 10 blocks away getting in the same cab I did? What are the chances of that? It’s New York City. C’mon,” he said.

Judy Putnam is a columnist with the Lansing State Journal. Contact her at (517) 267-1304 or at jputnam@lsj.com. Write to her at 120 E. Lenawee St., Lansing, MI, 48919. Follow her on Twitter @JudyPutnam.