Virginia Family Turns in $1 Million After They Stumble Upon It in the Middle of the Road

"You do the right thing and return it because it doesn't belong to us," Emily Schantz said

A Virginia family is being praised for their honesty after they stumbled upon $1 million in the middle of the road — and immediately turned it in.

Emily Schantz was out for a drive with her family on Saturday afternoon when they accidentally hit a bag that was in the middle of the road, she told CBS affiliate WTVR.

The car before them had swerved to avoid it, but they couldn’t, and the bag — which they initially thought was trash — made a “huge clunk noise,” she told the outlet.

Schantz, her husband and their two young sons pulled over and threw the bag in the back of their pick-up truck, and also tossed in a second bag they spotted 15 feet away.

When they returned to their Caroline County home hours later, however, they quickly realized their discovery wasn’t trash, but money — and a whole lot of it.

“Inside the bag there were little packages that were plastic bags and they were addressed on the front of them, and they said, ‘Cash vault,’” Schantz told WTVR.

They quickly turned over the money to authorities, who determined that they’d been riding around all day with nearly $1 million in their truck.

“To have someone so honest and willing to just give that $1 million back, it’s exception on their part, and their two sons were there, I put the police lights on for them,” Caroline County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Scott Moser told the outlet. “But we’re just very proud of them, and they really represented this county well by being so honest."

Moser said authorities are unsure just how the bags ended up in the middle of the road, but that they believe the money belonged to the postal service, and was meant for BB&T Bank.

As for turning in the cash, the decision was a no-brainer for Schantz.

“You do the right thing and return it because it doesn’t belong to us,” she said.