Digest

Found stashed in the attic: $100,000 in cash

By Times Wires
Published September 29, 2007

SANFORD

Bernard Salcedo was looking for a bad wire in his attic after the power went out when he found $100,000 in cash. Now the money is in a police evidence vault while Salcedo and his home's former owner argue over who should get it. Salcedo said he went to police because he was scared. He had heard that someone had been killed in his house years earlier. Similar bundles of cash found in the home of the slain Scott Quinn, a 37-year-old bail were returned that money to the victim's estranged wife, Lana Quinn, the widow's lawyer Michael Herring said. Salcedo's attorney, Eric Frommer, insisted there was no way to prove the money belonged to Lana Quinn.

PUNTA GORDA

Roommate kept corpse in house

A man kept the decomposing body of his 86-year-old roommate in their house for a month while he used the dead man's ATM card and cashed his checks, police said. David Morse, 40, told police that he didn't report roommate John Jones' death because Morse had active arrest warrants for failing to pay child support and he feared he would be implicated in the death, said Butch Arenal, Punta Gorda's deputy police chief. No cause of death was immediately determined.

TALLAHASSEE

What he didn't know may free him

Gary Lamar Polite, 42, a homeless man arrested in 2002 by Miami-Dade County police spent nearly five years in prison for resisting arrest. Now he'll get a new trial because of his claim that he didn't know the person he resisted was an undercover police officer. The Florida Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that someone cannot be convicted of resisting an officer with violence if the defendant didn't know that person was an officer.

[Last modified September 29, 2007, 00:53:33]