New York woman returned $8,000 that fell from the sky to limo crash widow
GLOVERSVILLE, New York -- What would you do if $8,000 fell from the sky? One good Samaritan made sure the rightful owner of the money got it back.
A New York woman whose husband died in a limousine crash that killed 20 people lost the money just before a cruise they'd planned as a honeymoon.
Kim Steenburg left her home with $8,500 in an envelope to deposit in the bank. Most of it was to pay her dad's property taxes, but some of it was for the honeymoon cruise she'd planned with her late husband.
Steenburg said she was so busy buckling her niece into her car seat that she left the envelope on top of the car. At the bank, her heart sank. The money was gone.
Frantically, she called her sister to go back to a stretch of Route 30A to search for the money. She said her sister found people grabbing cash along the side of the road.
One of those people was Terri Brubaker, who said she was driving along the road to pick up her daughter's prescription from a local pharmacy when she saw cash flying in the air - 20s, 50s, 100s.
She stopped immediately and starting grabbing as much money as she could for about five minutes before other cars stopped to help. Across the busy intersection, she saw more people collecting money.
She called the Fulton County Sheriff's Office and showed up to report the loss at the same time that Steenburg did to file a police report. Steenburg got all her money except for $500 back.
Both women are widows. Brubaker lost her husband of nearly 25 years in 2011, according to his obituary.
Steenburg tried to give Brubaker some money as a thank you, but she left immediately.
Sheriff Richard C. Giardino told the Times Union he knew both of the women previously. He said that if it had been someone other than Brubaker who stopped, the money might not have made it back to Steenburg - which would have been one more loss upon many for her.
"It's been difficult for all the families involved and then to lose the money, if only for a few minutes, is enough to add to the heartbreak," Giardino said.
Steenburg was planning to join her husband in the limo to celebrate her sister-in-law Amy Steenburg's 30th birthday that fateful day in October, but didn't go because she had a headache.
Rich and Kim Steenburg were married in June 2016 and had planned to go on the cruise for their honeymoon with Rich's younger brother Axel Steenburg and his wife Amy, who were married in June 2018. They were both killed in the Oct. 6 Schoharie limo crash alongside Rich. The crash killed 20 people - including two people in the parking lot of the Apple Barrel Country store - when the limo drove off of the road at the intersection of routes 30 and 30A and crashed into a ditch.
Kim Steenburg is on the cruise now with her sisters and their husbands and a couple of Amy's friends. She brought along Rich, Axel and Amy's ashes to scatter in the ocean.
"I plan on doing something special," Steenburg said. "I don't know what it is yet. I feel like when I get there, and when I experience it, that's when I'm going to know."
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