AUGUSTA – Brandy Gutierrez got a surprise birthday present last week when highway maintenance workers returned irreplaceable family photographs they found scattered along Interstate 95 two weeks ago.

A box of Gutierrez’s photos and scrapbooks and another box with her computer printer fell out of a crate on a truck as they were being delivered from Bangor to her new home in Augusta.

Rick Hume and Jim Daniels were patrolling for road debris when they spotted boxes and pictures spread across the southbound lanes of I-95 near the Augusta-Sidney line.

“The printer was on one side of the road, and the box with the photographs was on the other,” Hume said. “The truck must have just lost it, because the printer was still in the driving lane.”

The two men gathered the items and called police to report the find.

Hume noticed a photo of a man in uniform and some baby and family pictures.

“We’re going to be lucky to get them back to someone,” he recalled thinking to himself.

But when Augusta police officer Joseph Burke came to the garage Friday and started sorting through the photos, he thought he recognized Donald Duplessis of Augusta, who is Gutierrez’s father.

Burke called Duplessis and learned that the items belonged to Gutierrez.