Waukesha man loses pants, but not his shirt

Waukesha - The worst part wasn't that Mark Stahnke woke up Monday morning in the patio chair of some neighbor he didn't know.
Or that his pants were missing.
The worst part was the contents of his missing pants: a cashier's check for $41,093, which he meant to give to his son, and several hundred dollars in cash that he had gotten from the bank.

Stahnke still doesn't know what happened between the time he left a bar Sunday night and the time he woke up in some stranger's backyard Monday morning, but thanks to an honest citizen who found the missing pants and returned all the contents to the local authorities, Stahnke retrieved his valuables Friday from the Waukesha Police Department.
He got the pants back, too.
Stahnke had told the police his story about 7 a.m. Monday after he got home, but they were skeptical.

"We're used to hearing weird stories, but with his intoxication we figured this one would be different, that the amount of money wouldn't be exact," said Waukesha Police Lt. William Graham. "How do you get so intoxicated that you lose your pants?"
Stahnke said it happened like this: He had gone to the bank Saturday to get money to lend to his son. While he was there he cashed his paycheck. On Sunday night, he met his son in a bar.
"I ended up blacking out; I don't even remember leaving the place," Stahnke recalled. "I woke up cold not knowing where the heck I was, and I didn't realize it at first because I still had my shoes and socks on. When I got up, I realized, my God, I don't have any pants."

Fearing a citation for indecent exposure, Stahnke buttoned his flannel shirt down over his briefs and he picked his way around familiar streets - Linden, Oakland, Lincoln, Hartwell, Arcadian - toward his house. After getting home and dressed, he asked his wife what happened.
"I don't know," she said.
Meanwhile, Tim Curzan took a different path than usual while walking his dogs in Waukesha on Monday evening. He was trying to find a rummage sale.
Instead, his dog Joe found a pair of pants at the intersection of N. Greenfield Ave. and Linden St, according to a police report. The dog sniffed them. They jingled.

"There was a handful of change in one pocket," Curzan recalled. "In the other, I pulled out this wad of soggy paper. It was too sodden to unravel effectively, so I took the stuff home and when I saw how much money it was, I put it all in a bag."
He left the pants behind.
It wasn't until the items began to dry that Curzan found the cashier's check. Following the name on the check and an address on one of the stubs of paper, he tried twice, unsuccessfully, to deliver the items to what he thought was the owner's house.
On Wednesday, he saw the pants were still at the intersection, so he picked them up.

Then he took everything to the police station, and told the story to the woman at the front desk.
"You're kidding," she said.
Stahnke, who had been fretting because the people at the bank had said they couldn't stop payment of a cashier's check, was grateful to get his belongings back on Friday before heading to work.
As for Curzan, he said he never thought about keeping the money; it would have disappointed his mother.
"My mom's proud of me," Curzan said. "That's my reward."