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A BANK customer has lost her most important documents after her safety deposit box went missing.
Sandra Owens from Kansas City, Kansas, received a letter from her bank in December informing her that her safety deposit box was moved to another location after the branch it was originally kept in closed.
“The deed to my house, the title to my car, my birth certificate,” Owens told local Fox affiliate WDAF-TV, listing all of the important documents locked in her deposit box.
When Owens visited the new location where the letter said her safety deposit box was moved, she received devastating news.
“She says the whole box was missing,” Owens told WDAF.
The bank employee told Owens that her box was most likely taken or that she had forgotten about the deposit box altogether.
“Maybe you came in and got your box, and you don’t remember,” Owens told WDAF that’s what the employee told her.
“I’m old, but I can remember if I came in and got my safe deposit box,” Owens said.
Owens said she was so distraught that she called her sister to come down and help her.
The bank customer called the Kansas City police, but authorities said they could not report a theft because there was no evidence of a crime.
But luckily, with the help of the Bank of Labor’s senior vice president, she retrieved her valuables.
“Just give me 24 hours and I’ll see what I can do,” Owens said she was told, reports WDAF.
The next day, she was told that her box had been left behind in the now-closed but still-locked bank branch on Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas.
President of Safety Deposit Specialists Dave McGuinn, a former banker, told WDAF this was unusual.
“I’ve got 11 cases going on here in my office where similar things have happened,” he told WDAF.
McGuinn is hired to train banks about how to protect their customers’ safety deposit boxes.
More often than not, McGuinn said the banks are not diligent with their safety deposit boxes, which puts the customer and the bank at risk.
For this reason, the safety deposit expert told WDAF that major banks were no longer offering safety deposit boxes.
Also, he said there is not enough physical room in the bank’s branches to hold all safety deposit boxes.
A bank representative attributed some of the uncertainty around the box’s whereabouts to Owens’s many family members having legitimate access to it.
For this reason, it was initially thought that she or a family member had taken it.
The U.S. Sun has previously reported on bank customer’s safety deposit boxes going missing.
