Hillsborough’s Earl Garcia had planned to take his wife, Gilda, out to dinner Tuesday evening to celebrate her birthday. So instead of bringing in his briefcase from his truck like he normally does after practice, he decided to leave it there until after they returned.

But since Gilda is a busy elementary school principal at DeSoto and Earl’s schedule is equally frantic as a football coach, they just didn’t find time for it. Problem was, Earl Garcia never brought in his briefcase and, later that night, his truck was vandalized. Inside the briefcase was several hundred dollars in cash, four checkbooks with all his personal identification numbers and, maybe the most important thing to this veteran coach, portable flash drives containing all of the Terriers’ offensive plays, practice schedules and other team information.

Garcia discovered his truck was broken into when he left his home just after 6 a.m. Wednesday. His truck’s interior had been ransacked and the briefcase was gone. Garcia says he would park his truck inside his home’s garage, but the truck he bought is four inches too long for it. After calling the police, he and Gilda decided to check trash cans along the alley in back of their Seminole Heights home. It was garbage day and fortunately, the trucks were running late. After rummage through several cans in their work clothes, Earl Garcia found his briefcase—with everything still in it—inside a can.

“If the garbage trucks had been running at their normal time, my briefcase would have wound up in an incinerator,” Garcia said. “Everything I need to function as a coach and a person was in that thing. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t find it.”

An interesting side note: the policeman who turned up on the scene a few minutes later happened to be Armwood defensive line coach Ron Johnson.