What’s Lost By L.A. Commuters is Found By the MTA

By Sue Doyle LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

One passenger lost his prosthetic leg on a bus. Another forgot the container with her mother’s ashes. Someone else misplaced a human jawbone.

Some of the treasures left behind on Los Angeles’ buses, trains and subways find their way to a two-room gallery holding some 12,000 items. But many other possessions — some weird, some wacky, some mysterious — that are reported lost never reappear.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates its lost and found in the former Tilfords Restaurant at Wilshire Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, celebrating its reopening today after a $137,000 renovation.

“You learn a lot about people and their lives,” said April McKay, the MTA’s director of customer programs and services who oversees the lost and found.

Some 1.4 million people a day ride the MTA, carting along oxygen tanks, a locked box of church donations and their prescription medication — and, somehow, leaving them behind.

Schoolbooks, wallets and cell phones are the most common belongings turned in.

“There’s some of everything here,” said Lorna Riley, the MTA customer service agent who logs and sorts everything that comes through. “We even have children’s immunization records.”

If Riley finds identification or contact information on the item, she notifies owners that their possession awaits them. Most people are thrilled with the news, including the visitor from Costa Rica, who forgot a briefcase of cherished family photos while on a Los Angeles bus. Riley tracked him down in his native country using information about a Web site she found in his belongings.

About 15 percent of the purses, power tools and other possessions lining the facility’s shelves find their way home. Bicycles — there are some 2,000 of them waiting — have a 30 percent return rate, McKay said.

Some things — clothes, books and toys — are donated to the Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter on Skid Row. Backpacks that once toted schoolbooks to class are used by law enforcement agencies to train dogs to sniff out drugs and explosives. Most everything else not claimed in 30 days is turned over to Nationwide Auction Systems in Industry for sale.

The MTA last year netted $7,000 from lost-and-found items, in addition to $4,000 in unclaimed cash.

Not everything is salvaged or sold. A replica gun wrapped in a T- shirt that was found New Year’s Day on a Green Line platform was turned over to Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives, officials said.

Odds are that the fake gun’s owner won’t claim the loss.

But plenty of others arrive at the lost and found every day looking for their possessions.

Take the man who removed his prosthetic leg while he took a catnap on the bus.

It was gone when he awoke, said Riley, and was never turned in.

That was the same outcome for a woman who showed up searching for a suitcase carrying her mother’s cremated remains.

Then there’s the science professor who lost his class assignment – - a jawbone — on the bus. And the nervous lawyer who came repeatedly searching for a key ring with an important computer chip on it.

“Every day is different,” Riley said. “People have different stories. You never know what to expect.”

(c) 2007 Daily Breeze. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.