Even when luck seems to magically be in your favor, it’s always important to do the right thing; otherwise, like one Utah man, you might face jail time. 26-year-old Filiki Tiaua thought it was his lucky day when he was cleaning the plane after a Delta flight at the Salt Lake City International Airport, when he found a lost watch. As the “finders keepers” saying goes, he took the watch home after finishing his janitorial work for the day. He kept the watch for several months before his brother sold it earlier this year; that’s when the police took notice, tracked him down, and took him in.
For the authorities to get involved with this missing watch, you know things were serious. That’s because the Utah airplane cleaner hadn’t taken just any old watch. He took a passenger’s Omega watch, a luxury brand that can have wristwatches priced up to tens of thousands of dollars. In this case, it cost between $7,000 and $9,000, according to KSL. After the passenger got off, he realized his fancy watch wasn’t on him, and the flight crew, who claimed they didn’t see it, weren’t able to help.
Fortunately for him, the passenger had his Omega watch’s serial number uploaded to a database online. That made things rather easy for the police to pinpoint the thief when the wristwatch was pawned off by his brother. Since Filiki Tiaua was on the cleaning crew who was on the plane the day the watch went missing, and his brother was the one who sold it, it wasn’t too hard to put the pieces together. Now, this Utah man who took a lost watch home has been charged with a second-degree felony.
The Watch Thief Was Even Instructed by His Company Not To Take Lost Items
“The defense team plans to envoke the ‘finders keepers’ rule at trial,” joked a Reddit user reacting to the watch thief’s story. While funny, this sort of defense wouldn’t fly with the judge since police reports state that Tiaua’s airplane cleaning company has “strict and clear rules on turning in lost property.” One commenter complained that the only reason the police cared was that the $8K+ watch was over the felony threshold. Anything below… computers, phones, headphones…. never returned,” they sighed.
Since the value of the Omega watch was over $5,000, Tiaua’s punishment for a second-degree felony could be years in prison and a possible fine of up to $10,000, according to Utah law. Fortunately for the Delta passenger and Omega wristwatch’s owner, the watch’s serial number had been added to a national database for security’s sake. Those who don’t keep the serial numbers of their more costly items and bring them on a plane risk losing them for good, like one Hawaiian doctor did when he left behind his Bose headset on a United Airlines flight.
