Calgary teen reunited with lost wallet in time for his birthday

It took a group effort to return a wallet, loaded with cash, to its rightful owner - a Calgary teen saving for some basketball shoes for his birthday. (File)

This year's birthday will be one to remember for one teen whose savings were returned to him by a team of Calgary Transit employees.

Sloan McGinn-Thompson said he was riding on the bus during rush hour recently when his wallet fell out of his pocket.

"I didn't notice until I got off the bus," he told reporters on Friday. "By that time, the wallet is way down the street and there's no chance to catch up to it."

Sloan's wallet was discovered on a bus and handed over to driver Dominique Padmaraj who, in turn, passed it on the service's head office.

"When I reached my terminal, somebody approached me with a wallet," he said. "I opened it up and saw that it has a lot of cash."

Padmaraj says passengers hand over lost property all the time.

"Usually, if it's gloves, a hat, something like that we put it in the lost and found, but when its something like money, it's treated differently."

In the meantime, Sloan says he made a report to the service's lost and found, describing the wallet and its contents.

That helped once the wallet was given to operations supervisor Gurpal Guraya, the person responsible for the route on which the wallet was found. He made it his mission to return the money intact.

"(Guraya) tracked down Sloan's address to deliver the wallet himself," Calgary Transit said in a statement.

When Guraya found that no one was home at the time, he handed it over to the teen's neighbours.

"Even though the wallet was passed from person-to-person, it ended up in the right hands with the cash still there," officials said.

Both Sloan and his mom Karin were "overjoyed" that the missing wallet was located with all of its contents still there.

"So many good deeds happened," Sloan said. "It shows how there really are nice people in this world who do the right thing."

He ended up using the money on a pair of basketball shoes for his birthday.