On the nice list

Good Samaritan gives police envelope stuffed with cash lost by shopper

MANSFIELD - A widow goes out Christmas shopping and stumbles onto an envelope stuffed with $770 cash.

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Briefly, she considers buying an HDTV.

But no. She turns the money over to police.

"We're all sitting around here saying 'Jeepers Crow!' " said John Reilly, a police detective in North Attleborough. "Just when you think you lose your faith, this nice woman came along and does something nice."

Ann Marie Weineck, 54, a nursing supervisor for a skilled nursing facility, has been out of work since September, recovering from shoulder replacement surgery. She lives in Mansfield in a tidy light blue Colonial decorated with country furnishings, a burning gingerbread scented candle and a small, old Emerson television.

A few years ago when she was shopping for Christmas gifts, she set down her bags by a cash register and someone walked off with them. Once someone stole her grandson's stroller right out her front yard. Three years ago, her 50-year-old husband died of complications from a stroke. The holidays are bittersweet for her family, which includes two sons and a daughter who was pregnant when her father died.

"Things aren't the same now. . . . So if some thing like this can make me feel better and stop being such a bah-humbug as I have been, then that's a good thing," she said. "It's hard to get in the spirit, but this is certainly helping."

The woman who lost the envelope - Collette Martino, 48, of Pawtucket, R.I. - assumes it toppled out of her bag when she was grabbing her keys after shopping Wednesday night.

In a panic when she got home, she began retracing her steps. She called the Toys "R" Us where she had bought a big stuffed Elmo for her boyfriend's grandson, Rocco; they didn't know about the envelope. She went back to K-B Toy Works in Pawtucket at 10 p.m. and peeked in the windows of the closed shop, but still nothing

It wasn't until Thursday morning that she called Toys "R" Us again and learned someone had found the money and turned it over to police.

"She was ecstatic. She couldn't believe it," said Reilly. "She started crying."

Martino lives in an apartment infused with incense and filled with trinkets, dream catchers, stuffed animals, and four cats she rescued.

Martino, who is on disability, said she squirrels away money throughout the year to give her two daughters and two grandchildren a good Christmas.

"She saved my Christmas for my kids and my grandkids. I'm so flabbergasted. She restored my faith in humanity," she said.

"I can't tell you how much gratitude that I have for this woman."

She's hoping to send a little something to Weineck as a thank you. And, she's brainstorming for appropriate thank you gifts for the Police Department.

"I didn't see a wreath on their door," she said. "It's Christmas."

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at ebbert@globe.com.