When Emily Dickerson lost a ring containing a jewel made of her father’s ashes, an unlikely set of heroes emerged to return it to her.
The 17-year-old was out in San Antonio performing with her school choir, when at the end of the week the organizers decided to take some 200 singers and bandmembers to the beach at Corpus Christi.
At the time, Dickerson was wearing four sentimental rings: the cremation ring, one from her boyfriend, and two from her family members. Not wanting to lose them in the water, she hid them in a place where no potential thief idling by would think to look—in the empty box from the Subway lunch Dickerson had just eaten.
But in a case of out of sight out of mind, during the hustle of departure, she forgot about the Subway box, and it ended up in a dumpster with 200 others just like it.
“I realized where I had left them, and I was in a complete panic,” Dickerson told local news. “I called my mom and told her the situation. I was a mess.”
Dickerson’s father died when she was just 7 years old. She wears the ring continuously, knowing that he is always there with her.
Dickerson’s mom Tina Koch contacted the Dept. of Parks and Recreation in Corpus Christi, but it was by then 8 pm on a Friday. Leaving a desperate voicemail, Koch hoped without much hope that something might be done.
Enter Laura Perez, the parks operation supervisor, who listened to the voicemail first thing on Monday morning. Perez, according to the Washington Post, makes every effort to track down lost items, but she knew chances were slim.
All the beach trashcans would be collected and deposited into a 40-yard dumpster slated for pickup at 8:00 am; it was already half-past the hour.
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Nevertheless, she called the staff cleaning up that section of beach and was shocked to hear the dumpster was still there, at which point she ordered horses to be held, and rushed for a little Monday morning dumpster diving.
Jesse Martinez and Robert Trevino joined Perez in combing through the trash left baking over the weekend’s nearly 100°F heat. They searched for hours until they came upon a big with the Subway boxes, and methodically began opening them one by one until, at last, a purple jewel shined in the morning light.
“It was in the last bag we went through,” Perez told the Post. “I was so excited to let her know.”
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“We’re talking about four rings in a hot, nasty dumpster,” Koch told the Post in the aftermath. “I’m blown away. I don’t have enough praise for these people.”
As it happened, they only found the cremation ring first, but despite Koch’s pleadings, they kept on searching until half an hour later they had turned up all three.
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