Have you ever wondered what happens to unclaimed items at UNM’s lost and found?
A bulletin board full of keys, organized by car model, hangs in a small room where textbooks, documents, mail, electronics, clothing, backpacks, and thermoses are stored at UNM Police Department’s Lost and Found on the first floor of Hokona Hall.
UNMPD Lieutenant Timothy Stump said that when people report something as stolen, they check this room first.
Stump said oftentimes many give up looking for items they lose.
“They say, ‘My phone’s gone, it’s just gone.’ But they should call us. We might have it here,” he said.
Stump said some of the car and garage door keys people lose on campus might cost over two hundred dollars to replace, and the UNMPD lost and found also holds many expensive textbooks.
In the past, UNM would auction off unclaimed items from the Lost and Found office, with the University receiving the money from those auctions. The University discontinued the auctions after it was mandated that money from auctioned items go to the state.
Stump said if someone turns in money to lost and found, UNMPD holds it for 90 days, and if no one claims it, the person who turned in the money can pick it up and keep it.
“That’s standard with all police departments,” he said.
Stump said depending on what the items are, after 90 days items go to recycling, different charities, or homeless shelters.
UNMPD sometimes donates items to The Optimist Club, St. Mary’s Church, and the Mission, he said, as the charities they donate items to vary. He said most often clothing goes to recycling if there isn’t somewhere to donate them to.
Bicycles go to the UNM Physical Plant Department, as well as keys, which are given to PPD’s lock shop, he said.
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Daniel Richard, supervisor at PPD’s Lock Shop, said keys are separated according to whether they are brass, brass covered in nickel, or silver, and given to a local recycling company that melts them down.
Steel keys, which can’t be recycled, are usually discarded, he said.
UNM Sustainability Manager Mary Clark said UNM sells hundreds of keys at a time to Albuquerque Metal Recycling, which then writes UNM a check for the market rate of metal per pound.
The metal is then melted into bricks, she said, which are sold to another entity to be reused.
Brandi Kingston, a freshman criminology major, said she lost her phone at the Duck Pond, and someone turned it into the SUB’s Lost and Found, located at the information desk.
“They had me unlock the phone before they gave it to me, just to make sure it was mine,” she said.
SUB Project Coordinator Lorenzo Ruiz said he’s encountered people trying to receive unclaimed items that don’t belong to them at the SUB.
A wallet was given away one time and the real owner arrived to claim it later, he said. People often come to the lost and found trying to receive smartphones and textbooks so they can sell them back for cash.
Ruiz said those who attempt to claim lost and found items that are not theirs are not just people from outside the UNM community, but also students.
“It’s not just homeless people who try to receive free items. Many homeless people come to us, and they really did lose the item they are looking for,” he said. “Thieves come in all sizes and colors.”
Ruiz said that expensive items held at the SUB are kept away in a safe that only a handful of building managers have access to, adding that expensive glasses went missing from the safe once. The employee who took them was eventually caught on camera and terminated.
He said items are held in the safe for 14 to 16 days and then brought to UNMPD.
“Every building has a lost and found,” he said. “50 percent of the time, people find what they’ve lost.”
