A homeless Florida man may soon have a place to call his own after he discovered a forgotten bank account with enough money to rent an apartment, ABC News reported.
Thanks to a Tampa police officer and a homeless shelter manager, John Helinski, 62, discovered a long-lost bank account that had been collecting Social Security checks for years.
Helinski's story begins in Poland, where he was born to a mother who was a visiting U.S. citizen, making him a citizen, police told the station. He later ended up homeless living in a cardboard box in Tampa for three years, but it is not clear how.
In late 2014, Helinski went to a homeless shelter run by the Drug Abuse and Comprehensive Coordinating Office Inc. There, with the help of the shelter's case manager Charles Inman and Tampa Police Department Officer Daniel McDonald, Helinksi started piecing his life together.
"As a homeless liaison officer, the bread and butter of my work often involves hopping department to department trying to help homeless people find the ID they need in order to get things like work and housing," McDonald told ABC News.
Helinski's ID and other personal documents were either stolen or lost during his time on the streets. So McDonald drove him to a tax collector's office, where he was issued a temporary Florida state ID card. The next step was ordering his birth records from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, the station reported.
"With his consular birth certificate and temporary ID, we went to the Social Security office, and I just walked up to them and said, 'This man used to have benefits, can you help us?'" McDonald said.
That's when Helinski learned he had been receiving Social Security disability benefits this entire time.
Finally, after going to Helinski's old bank, he discovered his account "had still been collecting pension money over time," McDonald told ABC News.
Helinksi, who for now is still at the homeless shelter, said he thought his benefits were cancelled long ago and could never find out because he lost his debit card.
While he did not want to say how much is in the account, Helinski told ABC News he can rent a modest apartment and buy food without a job. He said he is thankful for all of McDonald's and Inman's help.
"This situation looked really difficult, and I wasn't sure how it was going to end up," Inman told ABC News. "If it failed, it meant we'd put a 62-year-old man on the street, and Officer McDonald and I were not OK with that."
