‘Act of honesty’ ends in cash payoff Attempts to find owner of $120 unsuccessful; Orono boy given money

ORONO – Sometimes it pays to do the right thing, and for 13-year-old Parker Hall of Orono, it paid in cash.

Hall found $120 on the University of Maine campus Aug. 30 and turned it in to the UM Department of Public Safety. Now, more than three months later, he was given the money after attempts to locate the owner were unsuccessful.

“I knew it was the right thing, I guess,” Hall said on Friday. “I didn’t really think about keeping it.”

UM Police Chief Noel March presented Hall with a letter of gratitude and the money – all $120 still sealed in the manila evidence envelope – on Friday at the Public Safety building.

The Orono Middle School eighth-grader said he hopes to buy a new bass guitar with the cash. After playing for about a year, he’s had his eye on a wood-grain Ibanez.

Hall and his friend had been riding their bicycles to the university’s tennis courts, where they were to meet Hall’s father, Tim, and older brother, Travis.

After he found the money lying loose on the ground in front of Cutler Health Center, Hall brought it to the dispatcher at Public Safety.

Officer Carroll DeBeck was called in to take the report and record Hall’s statement.

“It’s something not too many kids would do,” DeBeck said.

“He’s just a good kid,” Irene Hall, Parker’s mother, said. “We take it for granted that our kids would do this, so this is nice – it reinforces it.”

Tim Hall said he didn’t have to prompt his son to turn the money in.

“He said, ‘Look what I found,’ and knew it was the right thing,” Tim Hall said. “We’re proud.”

In the letter of recognition from the university, March called Hall’s conduct “an act of honesty and integrity that is highly valued and all too rare.”