Police honor Edmonds teen for turning in buried treasure

EDMONDS — It’s not often that Edmonds police get a call about buried treasure.

This time, it was the real deal.

A local teenager was taking out the trash in March 2015 when he noticed what appeared to be a strange mound in his family’s side yard.

He started digging.

The mound turned out to be a tattered pillowcase full of jewelry, credit cards and cash, according to the Edmonds Police Department.

The boy, Luke Schimpf, alerted his mother, who called police.

Luke, who turns 15 in July, recently was honored by the police department for his honesty. He received a Citizen Service Citation for honorable actions at the department’s annual awards ceremony May 19.

Through his mother, Luke declined to be interviewed for this story, citing shyness over the recent fanfare.

The trove of items he found was worth an estimated $1,200, according to the police report. It included pendants, bracelets and rings, some of it precious and some of it costume.

After talking to the Schimpfs, Edmonds officers did some digging of their own. They compared the items to a database of goods reported as stolen.

One ring in particular matched “a detailed description” from a burglary report taken in May 2014, police Sgt. Shane Hawley said. The victims in that report matched the names on the credit cards found in the pillowcase.

Officers learned that everything in the pillowcase came from the same burglary. The victims live one street away from the Schimpfs, near the old Woodway High School. The police let the victims know about the discovery.

“Some of those things are passed down from family members and really have as much sentimental value as they do monetary value,” Hawley said. “They were very happy to get some of those items back.”

Not everything was recovered. After the burglary, some of the stolen credit cards were used in Pierce County, Hawley said. Police now are seeking identity theft charges for a 30-year-old Auburn man.

Luke was nominated for the award because he did the right thing when nobody was looking, Hawley said. The pillowcase of jewelry likely sat unattended for nearly a year, he said.

Among items turned over to police were two rolled-up $100 bills.

Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.