A Restaurant Owner Returned $12,000 He Found Hidden in a Cabinet
When Sak Yiengjuntuek took over Lemongrass Thai Restaurant in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in April 2025, the sale came with the usual leftovers of a place that used to belong to someone else. One of them was a cabinet the previous owner hadn’t taken with him. Yiengjuntuek had no spot for it inside, so he carried it out behind the building and left it there, the kind of thing you mean to deal with later.
Later took a while. A fire broke out next door, at a furniture gallery, and it knocked out the restaurant’s power. Lemongrass couldn’t run without it, and the doors stayed closed for months while things got sorted out.
When the power came back, Yiengjuntuek started cleaning up. He figured he’d finally move that cabinet to his house, and before hauling it off he began going through the drawers. Most of it read like junk left by someone clearing out in a hurry, and he threw a lot of it away. Then he came across an old sunglasses case and flipped it open.
“I thought it was just sunglasses, you know, I threw away a lot of stuff. And then, ‘oh, there’s money in there,’ I was shocked.”
The case held $12,000 in cash.
On paper, the money was his to keep. He owned the cabinet. He owned the building. The man who’d left it behind had been gone for more than a year. Yiengjuntuek looked at it a different way.
“I feel like this is the right thing to do. You know, it doesn’t belong to you, you need to return to someone else that it belongs to.”
Finding the previous owner turned out to be harder than deciding to. The number he had on file for the man was disconnected, a dead end that could have closed the whole thing right there. But something nagged at him: he might have the same contact stored under another name. He scrolled back, found that entry, dialed, and this time it rang through.
The voice on the other end belonged to the previous owner, who was dealing with serious health problems. As WMBF News reported, he told Yiengjuntuek the timing could hardly have been better.
The money had landed with someone who needed it, at a moment when the need was real. It had survived a lot to get there: a forgotten drawer, a fire next door, months without power, and it still reached the person it belonged to.
Asked to explain his choice, Yiengjuntuek kept it simple. “Honesty, integrity, is very important in life.”
